in Jttbta 
 
 ilnt.JiilliIII] 
 
 By Sir U^illiam I hint
 
 India Beneial Officers' Sook CM 
 
 Book No. J^jL-.Bouglit . m4 
 
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 NO87S3-500. CALCUTTA.
 
 JucCc, Cf^af #--<- ■i^'A-^-
 
 Zhc ^backera^s in Jnbia
 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
 XTbc tCbachera^e in Jnbia 
 
 AND SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 
 By sir WILLIAM WILSON HUNTER, K.C.S.I., M.A., LL.D. 
 
 HENRY FROWDE, LONDON : 1897
 
 TO MY DEAR WIFE 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
 
 First Edition, January 1897: 5000 copies. 
 
 a
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chap. I.— Some Calcutta Graves .... 9 
 
 Chap. II.— Thackeray's Grandfather in Bengal . 63 
 
 Chap. III.— Thackeray's Uncles in India . . .111 
 
 Chap. IV.— Thackeray's Father in Bengal. . . 141
 
 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 
 
 ' It is said that the last descendant of Mihon 
 died a parish clerk in Calcutta.' At least so wrote 
 the easy-going biographer in the Chandos edition, 
 and not having my Masson at hand, it did not 
 occur to me that for Calcutta one should read 
 Madras, The careless rumour set me wandering 
 for a few evenings among the old burial-grounds 
 of the city, to see if perchance I might come on 
 the grandson of that youngest daughter Deborah 
 whom Milton loved. 
 
 The great magazines of mortality upon the 
 outskirts of Calcutta were explored in vain. 
 Gradually, however, in pacing up and down their 
 thick-set avenues of tombs, the parish clerk was
 
 lO THE THACKERAY S IN INDIA 
 
 crowded out of my mind by the long- procession 
 of well-known Indian names: some of them en- 
 nobled by heroic deeds, some mutely protesting 
 against unmerited obloquy, not a few tarnished by 
 greed and crime, but all pleading the pardon that 
 is earned by death. 
 
 Most mournful of graveyards are those walled-up 
 ghostly settlements, desolate spaces of brick ruins 
 and blotched plaster, reproachful of forgetfulness and 
 neglect. It was difficult to restrain some retrospec- 
 tive pity for the inmates of the squalid tenements 
 — for their hard, hot lives more than a hundred 
 years ago, solaced by none of the alleviations which 
 have become the necessaries of our modern Indian 
 existence ; with few airy verandas or lofty ceilings, 
 without punkahs, without ice, without the possi- 
 bility of change to the hills, or respite to their exile 
 by visits home. The mental stagnation of a small 
 society given to arrack punch and heavy dinners in 
 the heat of the tropical day, and dependent for their 
 news from the outer world on three or four ship- 
 ments a year, produced a tediwn vitae even harder 
 to bear. ' The waste of spirits in this cursed 
 country,' cries Sir Philip Francis, the ^an of all
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES II 
 
 Others best fitted to bear up against the malady, 
 ' is a disease unconquerable, a misery unutterable.' 
 If the world dealt hardly with them in life, it has 
 made no amends to their memory. As I thought 
 of how much they achieved, and how little they 
 have been honoured, I found myself involuntarily 
 composing an apologia for the dead. 
 
 The English drama in India is played amid a 
 bustle of exits and entrances, and a hurried scene- 
 shifting, which allow time for nothing but the 
 present. Migratory Calcutta takes knowledge only 
 of the people with whom it dances and dines, and 
 regards all others, who do not go out, with an 
 unconcern quite good natured but absolutely com- 
 plete. Now the dwellers in these silent settlements 
 have not gone out anywhere for a century. They 
 have sat at no man's feast nor heard any church- 
 bell knoll, and the most famous of them, under 
 their pyramidal tombs, are objects of as genteel an 
 indifference to Calcutta as is the half-pagan popu- 
 lation fallen away from Christian rites in the slums 
 of the city. History, too, turns from them with 
 an averted eye. They took part in great events 
 and left a rich inheritance to the nation. But they
 
 12 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 did SO amid a furious cross-fire of invective that 
 leaves for many of them only the choice between 
 infamy and oblivion. 
 
 It was their hard destiny to make, unloved, an 
 empire. The rude conflict of interests at home 
 and in India, amid which that empire was reared, 
 allowed little chance of fair treatment to the 
 builders, with their sword in one hand and the 
 trowel in the other. The slanders of the last 
 century still putrefy in a mass of Reflections and 
 Considerations and British Museum tracts. Carac- 
 cioli's Liye of Clive forms a good foul specimen 
 of their dregs, and Macaulay's story of Warren 
 Hastings' parentage an iridescent bubble from 
 their scum. 
 
 Yet to these poor predecessors of ours, who lived 
 and died at their work, and to whom fame was 
 always half disfame, we owe no small debt. They 
 found Calcutta a swamp, and they created on it 
 a capital. They are reproached for the superfluity 
 of mosquito-breeding ponds and cholera- haunted 
 tanks which they scattered over the town. But we 
 forget that much of Calcutta was then a marsh, amid 
 which its builders had to dig wide, deep holes, so as
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 13 
 
 to get a little earth with which, like beavers, they 
 might pile up dry spots for their dwellings. The 
 excavations that yielded the raised mounds for 
 their homes upon an almost fluid ooze, are the 
 mosquito -breeding ponds of to-day. We are apt 
 to forget, tq^jpthe price paid for Calcutta by past 
 generations of Englishmen ; that, in fact, our City 
 of Palaces is circumvallated by entrenchments of 
 their dead. 
 
 In the South Park Street graveyard, that aceldama 
 of ancient animosities, how many fierce passions 
 have been shovelled underground ! It was opened 
 in 1767, just before the final struggle by which 
 England declared that India should be thenceforward 
 not alone the concern of the Company, but also of 
 the nation. The blundering ignorance with which 
 Parliament gave effect to this righteous resolve 
 formed one of the many dangers that British rule in 
 India has survived, almost in spite of the rulers. 
 Instead of sending out a Governor- General to take 
 command in the joint names of the Company and 
 the Crown, Parliament retained the Company's 
 Governor, Warren Hastings, and sent out a Council 
 to override him by a majority of votes.
 
 14 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Of the three councillors thus despatched to 
 Bengal, two had no experience in civil adminis- 
 tration, the third has come down in history as the 
 most malignant Englishman of that age. If any 
 doubt still exists as to the identity of Francis with 
 Junius in England, he stands revealed as an un- 
 abashed Junius in Bengal — a Junius set free from the 
 fear of the pillory, and with his ears safe from 
 the hangman's knife. 
 
 Philip Francis sailed for India with a sore heart. 
 Notwithstanding his cleverness as an official and the 
 terrible power of his pen, he found himself a failure 
 in English political life. He had lost money by 
 speculating in the public funds, he had thrown up 
 his War Office appointment in chagrin at being 
 superseded, the two final letters of Junius had fallen 
 flat. The Indian Council opened to him possibilities 
 of a new and higher flight. He was still young, 
 exactly thirty- four years of age, when he landed 
 at Calcutta in October, 1774. The two colleagues 
 who accompanied him were soldiers of fashion, and 
 indeed of merit. But Francis felt that in his 
 administrative ambitions he could use them as tools. 
 They were elderly men, as age was then reckoned in
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 15 
 
 the Indian official world. General Clavering was 
 fifty-two, and Colonel Monson forty-four. Francis 
 hoped with good reason to outlive them both. 
 
 Of the two other councillors awaiting them in 
 India, one was the Governor-General, Warren 
 Hastings, who entered the Company's service as 
 far back as 1 750, and whose retirement seemed in 
 1774 a question of five years at the utmost. The 
 second, Barwell, son of a former Governor of Bengal, 
 had made a rapid fortune, and although only thirty- 
 three years of age, he longed to enjoy it in England. 
 Francis looked on himself as the residuary legatee 
 of the powers wielded by his four colleagues. 
 Shortly after his arrival in Calcutta he wrote with 
 characteristic arrogance of ' this glorious Empire 
 which I was sent to save and govern.' As he 
 wound his meshes round Hastings he took a more 
 confident tone. ' I am now, I think, on the road 
 to the Government of Bengal, which I believe is the 
 first situation in the world attainable by a subject. 
 I will not balk my future.' 
 
 Francis found, however, that in order to oust 
 Warren Hastings, he must first ruin liim. During 
 the twenty-one years' combat which followed, he
 
 l6 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 exhausted every resource of incrimination and in- 
 trigue. His correspondence was a long" libel against 
 the man whose destruction he sought, at times rising 
 to shrieks of malevolence, ' The Court of Directors 
 is devoted to Hastings,' he wrote, ' and I am in 
 hopes will go to the devil with him.' One by one 
 his poisoned darts fell blunted off the armour of 
 quiet persistence which Hastings opposed to all 
 attacks. But in 1774 Francis started with every- 
 thing in his favour — the promise of the future 
 which belongs to youth, and in the present the 
 power of crushing the Governor- General by the 
 votes of himself and his two military allies in 
 Council. 
 
 The first act of the drama extended over six 
 years, and closed in 1 780 with the retreat of Francis 
 to England ; outmanoeuvred in Council ; beaten at 
 his own weapon, the pen ; leaving his two allies in 
 their graves ; and carrying on his body the mark of 
 Hastings' pistol-shot. The second act lasted fifteen 
 years, and ended in 1795 with the acquittal of 
 Hastings on every charge by the House of Lords. 
 The active vendetta against him then ceased, leaving 
 to his enemies the pangs of disappointed hatred.
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES l^ 
 
 But the curtain finally fell on a more imposing 
 scene, after Francis aeiernufJt servans sub peciore 
 vulnus had dropped out of public life, when in 
 1 8 1 3 the House of Commons rose in honour of the 
 great Governor-General, and stood bare-headed 
 as Warren Hastings passed forth. 
 
 The South Park Street burial-ground supplies 
 the necrology of the first or Calcutta act of this 
 long drama. There rests Sir John Clavering, the 
 irate Commander-in-Chief, who in his duel with 
 a colleague in Council, Barwell, was with diflSculty 
 withdrawn from the ground, furiously calling for 
 another shot. It is due to Barwell to add that this 
 demand arose solely from the extreme pugnacity of 
 the general. Clavering had wanted to fight the 
 Duke of Richmond for words used in public debate 
 before he left England, and he nearly fought Warren 
 Hastings in India. At one crisis, indeed, it seemed 
 as if he would array the military forces against the 
 civil government in Bengal. On hearing of 
 Hastings' conditional resignation, Sir John Claver- 
 ing instantly declared himself Governor-General, 
 and demanded the keys of the Fort. It was only 
 the firm calm of Hastings, backed by the Supreme 
 
 B
 
 l8 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Court, that averted a collision between the civil 
 and the military powers. The poor passionate 
 knight has lain very quiet since one sweltering- 
 afternoon in August, 1777, when, writes Francis, 
 ' after a delirium of many hours [he] expired at 
 half-past two p.m., and was buried at eight. The 
 Governor ordered minute guns.' 
 
 A year previously the other ally of Francis, 
 Colonel Monson, had been borne to the same grave- 
 yard. Monson suffered miseries from the climate 
 since the day he reached India, and was soon forced 
 to fly to sea to save his life. Two years after his 
 arrival he resigned his office, sorely stricken with 
 disease. But before he could escape to England, 
 death clutched him. In September, 1776, they 
 buried him in a nameless grave, beside that of his 
 wife, Lady Anne, who had died in the preceding 
 February. 
 
 They lie separately but close together in the 
 South Park Street burial-ground, in two long 
 graves covered with crumbling arched brick- 
 work, over which no inscription was ever placed. 
 Clavering's tomb stands hard by. 
 
 The Lady Anne Monson felt that she was much
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 19 
 
 too good tor Indian society, being in fact a daughter 
 of the Earl of Darlington, and a great grand- 
 daughter of Charles II by Barbara Villiers. But 
 she consoled herself for her uncourtly surroundings 
 by whist parties that led the fashion in Calcutta. 
 She herself was a superior player, and it was at her 
 house that Francis began his whist winnings, which, 
 as he tells a friend in 1 776, ' on one blessed day of the 
 present year of our Lord ' amounted to ;^20,ooo. 
 
 It was Lady Anne, too, who set afloat the story 
 that Warren Hastings 'was the natural son of 
 a steward of her father's.' One might have thought 
 that the remembrance of her own slip in life would 
 have warned her off such dangerous ground. But 
 if the men ot that wrathful age lied about their 
 opponents, the ladies fibbed with a subtler venom. 
 Nor was her slander more audacious than the false- 
 hood to which Macaulay has put the seal of history, 
 Macaulay informs us that Hastings' father, 'an 
 idle, worthless boy, married before he was sixteen, 
 lost his wife in two years, and died in the West 
 Indies.' The parish registers and Oxford lists 
 prove that the ' idle, worthless boy ' was an ordained 
 clergyman, educated at Balliol College, and twenty- 
 B3
 
 20 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 four or twenty-six years of age when he married 
 his wife, who was herself twenty-five. 
 
 The legend lives, and will live, in the picturesque 
 pages of Macaulay, whose dangerous gift it was to 
 equally take captive his readers whether he were 
 right or wrong. His genius embedded in amber 
 a calumny that would otherwise have died a 
 natural death. Whatever were the failings or 
 misfortunes of Hastings' father, they were the fail- 
 ings and misfortunes of an educated grown-up man. 
 Sixteen months of the Calcutta climate silenced 
 Lady Anne Monson's backbiting for ever. 'After 
 lying speechless through the day,' writes Francis' 
 secretary on February i8, 1776, 'she departed last 
 night about ten.' The poor lady has talked no 
 scandal since. 
 
 The secretary of Francis was his brother-in-law ; 
 brother of that faithful wife whom Francis left in 
 England, and to whom he proved so false. This 
 retainer also fell a victim to the climate, without 
 even the empty honour of a tomb in the Calcutta 
 necropolis. In November, i ^^6, the secretary fled 
 to sea in hope of recovery, but only to find a grave 
 on the solitary Ganjam coast. Within three years
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 21 
 
 after Francis landed under the guns of Fort William, 
 confident that he held the reversion of India, death 
 had stripped him of the last of his allies, and he 
 stood at bay, alone. It was the memory of these 
 Indian gT-aves, and of the bullet which he put into 
 Francis' right side, that stirred Hastings to his 
 stern summary of the struggle : ' My antagonists 
 sickened, died, and fled.' 
 
 In the South Park Street burial-ground also lies 
 Colonel Pearse, who acted as second to Warren 
 Hastings in his duel with Francis. Colonel Pearse 
 pleasantly records that he found ' the gentlemen 
 were both unacquainted with the modes usually 
 observed on those occasions.' But if the combatants 
 asked questions of ignorance, they had a very clear 
 idea as to what they had come to do in that jungle- 
 lane. There is, indeed, something above the pas- 
 sions of humanity in Hastings' quiet resolve to bring 
 the anarchy to an end. On July 3, 1 780, he wrote 
 a Minute which charged Francis with treachery 
 and falsehood in regard to the Maratha War. 
 ' I judge of his public conduct by my experience of 
 his private, which I have found void of truth and 
 honour. This is a severe charge, but temperately
 
 22 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 and deliberately made,' he added, to leave no option 
 as to the result. 
 
 The same day, however, Francis took to bed 
 with fever, and for six weeks Hastings kept his 
 Minute loaded to the muzzle in his desk. On 
 August 14, 1 780, Francis having recovered, Hastings 
 politely sent him a copy of it, to avoid anything 
 like a scene at the meeting of Council next fore- 
 noon. When they reached the ground three morn- 
 ings afterwards, Hastings objected to fourteen paces 
 — adopted on the precedent of the late Fox and 
 Adam duel in England — as being ' a great distance 
 for pistols.' Himself nothing of a marksman, he 
 let Francis deliberately raise his weapon 'three 
 times to the present.' When it missed fire, he 
 waited till it was freshly primed, and again allowed 
 his adversary the first shot. Hastings then fired. 
 ' Mr. Francis staggered,' wrote Colonel Fearse, ' and 
 in attempting to sit down, he fell and said he was 
 a dead man. Mr. Hastings, hearing this, cried out, 
 " Good God, I hope not ! " and immediately went 
 up to him.' 
 
 Francis was not killed. But a few months later 
 his broken health drove him home to England,
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 23 
 
 where he lived a life of active malevolence for 
 thirty-eight more years. He died quietly in his 
 sleep at the age of seventy-eight. In the same 
 year, 1818, Warren Hastings passed painfully 
 away, aged eighty-six. Colonel Pearse, his second 
 in the duel, with an heroic record of Guadaloupe, 
 Havanna, Belleisle, and the Carnatic, did not live 
 to go home. He was buried in Calcutta in 1 789, 
 ' the senior dfl&cer of the Bengal army,' at the age 
 of forty -seven. 
 
 In the fierce struggles of the pent-up stifling 
 Settlement, no reputation was too high, no fate 
 too tragic, to escape the ravening tusk of slander. 
 How these poor dead people hated their great 
 men! They stoned their prophets: to be men- 
 tioned was to be defamed. It is with a sense of 
 relief that we turn from what was said about the 
 founders of the British power in India to what they 
 did. Whatever their failings or their falsehoods, 
 the libellers and the libelled dwell very quietly with 
 each other now. The defamed lie as cool as their 
 defamers. If our Calcutta graveyards are not 
 temples of reconciliation, they are at least sanctu- 
 aries of silence. And, alike for some hard, mean
 
 24 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 ambitions which they cover over, and for some 
 noble names done to dishonour by slanderous 
 tongues, perhaps silence is most merciful. Here 
 they fear no more the heat of the sun, falsehood 
 and censure rash come not near them, and in place 
 of the sharp bitings of malice they have but to 
 encounter the toothless maw of the worm. 
 
 How much of the fierce invective of that age are 
 we to believe ? We must remember that it was the 
 age in which Mr. Batson struck Warren Hastings 
 in the Council Chamber with his fist. It was also 
 the age in which a Governor of Madras, Lord Pigot, 
 snatched away a mutinous resolution from his 
 colleagues in Council, suspended them from office, 
 ordered the arrest of the commander of the troops, 
 was himself seized by the military, and died in con- 
 finement. 
 
 ' I will not content myself,' wrote Francis of the 
 great Commander-in-Chief who came after Claver- 
 ing, ' with saying I never knew, but upon my soul 
 I never heard of, so abandoned a scoundrel. It is 
 a character to which your English ideas of dirt and 
 meanness do not reach. Nor is it to be met with 
 even in Bengal: even here it excites execration
 
 / 
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 25 
 
 and contempt.' Shall we accept these words as 
 a fair portrait of the warrior-statesman before whose 
 monument in Westminster Abbey, with its figures 
 of Victory and a conquered Province, many a young 
 soldier has paused to read a nation's record of the 
 services of Sir Eyre Coote ? 
 
 Barwell, as we saw, escaped the bullet of Claver- 
 ing. He went home to pose as a nabob for a quarter 
 of a century in Sussex, and to order round ' more 
 curricles.' But the pistols of Honourable Members 
 of Council in the last century were less deadly than 
 their pens. They safely stabbed each other in their 
 diaries, and poignarded their enemies in letters to 
 England, If Barwell passed scathless through the 
 fire of one colleague, he fell a victim to a ' private 
 memorandum ' of another. ' Mr. Barwell, I think,' 
 wrote Francis, ' has all the bad qualities common to 
 this climate and country, of which he is in every 
 sense a native ; but I do not aflSrm that there is no 
 mixture whatsoever of good in his composition. 
 He is rapacious without industry, and ambitious 
 without an exertion of his faculties or steady appli- 
 cation to affairs. He will do whatever can be done 
 by bribery and intrigue. He has no other resource.'
 
 26 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 ^Vhat degree of verisimilitude shall we credit 
 to these appalling silhouettes of darkest shadow ? 
 Barwell seems to have been in truth a greedy and 
 pompous' person. But if one memory could have 
 been spared, it might surely have been that of 
 Admiral Watson, who brought succour to the 
 Settlement in its dire extremity after the Black 
 Hole, How dire was that extremity it is now 
 difficult to realize. All through the rains of 1 756 
 our hapless refugees from Calcutta were huddled 
 together at Fulta in the fever-stricken delta; a 
 crowd of haggard white men and despairing white 
 women with their skeleton children, in boats or 
 straw hovels, dependent for their daily food on the 
 pity of the natives ; ' clad in the meanest apparel,' 
 writes an eye-witness, ' and for almost five months 
 surrounded by sickness and disease.' They sank 
 so low as to approve ' a complimentary letter ' to 
 the Prince who had driven them forth and suffocated 
 their countrymen in the Black Hole, ' complaining 
 a little of the hard usage of the English Honourable 
 Company,' but assuring His Highness of their 
 ' good intentions, notwithstanding what had hap- 
 pened, and begging ' — for provisions. So run the
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 27 
 
 minutes of the Bengal Council held on board 
 the Phoenix schooner at Fulta on August 22, 
 
 To this broken band came Admiral Watson in 
 December with a fleet and an army. It should be 
 remembered that Admiral Watson, not Colonel 
 Clive, commanded the expedition ; although the 
 Admiral proved his patriotism at a critical moment 
 by waiving his rights, and so averted a deadlock 
 between the sea and land forces. Within eight 
 months he delivered Calcutta, and captured the 
 strongholds higher up the river — Hugh city from 
 the native power, Chandarnagar from the French 
 — and turned the great sea-entrance to Bengal for 
 once and for ever into a British highway. At the 
 end of that half-year of hard fighting he died on 
 August 16, 1757, in the flower of manhood and 
 with honour at its height. They laid him among 
 the ruins of St. John's churchyard, which he had 
 wrested back from the destroyers. Yet even on 
 his tomb, with its ' Exegii monunienttifn acre 
 perenm'us^ the reptiles of that age did not fear to 
 spill their slaver. They had forged the Admiral's 
 name to Clive 's fictitious treaty, and found a con-
 
 28 THE THACKERAY S IN INDIA 
 
 federate to aver that it was done with the dead 
 hero's connivance and cowardly assent. 
 
 England meanwhile had won the water-gate of 
 Bengal, and a practical nation does not too closely 
 count the cost. But what those eight months of 
 fighting meant may be learned from one fact. Soon 
 after Watson's death his gallant comrade, Major 
 Kilpatrick, was buried, in October, 1757. ' Of the 
 250 soldiers who came with him [Kilpatrick] in 
 August, 1 756,' writes the Admiral's surgeon, ' only 
 five survived their commander, and these were now 
 by repeated sickness emaciated to the greatest 
 degree.' 
 
 A single episode, however, tells that heroic story 
 better than any nouns of multitude. When they 
 brought Admiral Watson to St. John's church- 
 yard, they dug his grave near to a mound newly 
 raised over a midshipman of his own flag-ship. 
 'Billy' Speke was the son of Captain Henry Speke 
 of the Kent, which carried the Admiral's red pennant 
 at her mizzen-top-mast. During the capture of the 
 French settlement Chandarnagar, or Fort Orleans 
 on the Hugli as it was called, the Kent received 
 138 cannon-shot through her side next the fort,
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 29 
 
 her decks were swept with grape, her masts and 
 "^i^"g" hacked to pieces, and within three hours 
 III of her crew lay wounded or dead. Captain 
 Speke and his son, a lad of sixteen years the 
 doctor says, were struck at the same moment. The 
 wounded Captain, seeing his boy's leg hanging 
 only by the skin, remarked to the Admiral, ' In- 
 deed, sir, this was a cruel shot to knock down both 
 the father and the son.' 'Mr. Watson's heart was 
 too full to make the least reply,' writes the surgeon, 
 disjointed sentences from whose narrative may 
 complete the tale. 
 
 After doing what he could for the father, Dr. Ives 
 went to the son. But the lad would not allow 
 him to touch the leg until the surgeon assured him 
 'upon my honour' that his father's wound had 
 been dressed and promised well. ' Then,' replied 
 the boy, ' pray, sir, look to and dress this poor man 
 who is groaning so sadly beside me.' ' I told him 
 that he already had been taken care of. He calmly 
 observed, " Sir, I fear you must amputate above 
 the joint." I replied, "My dear, I must!" Upon 
 which he clasped both his hands together, and 
 lifting his eyes in the most devout and fervent
 
 30 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 manner towards heaven, he offered up the follow- 
 ing short but earnest petition : " Good God, do 
 Thou enable me to behave worthy of my father's 
 son." I then performed the operation above 
 the joint of the knee; but during the whole 
 time the intrepid youth never spake a word or 
 uttered a groan that could be heard at a yard 
 distance.' 
 
 Throughout the long torture of the amputation, 
 the father lay stretched close to his son. ' But what- 
 ever were his [the father's] feelings, we discovered 
 no other expressions of them than what the silent 
 trickling tears declared, though the bare recollec- 
 tion of the scene, even at this distant time, is too 
 painful for me.' Next morning both were taken, 
 together with the rest of the wounded, to Calcutta : 
 the father being lodged in a relative's house, the 
 poor boy in the hospital under the doctor's own 
 eye. After thirteen days of agony, aggravated by 
 anxieties for his father, and apparently by Voices 
 in fevered dreams whispering that his father was 
 dead, the end came. 'The dear youth had been 
 delirious,' continues the doctor, ' the evening pre- 
 ceding the day on which he died, and at two o'clock
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 31 
 
 in the morning, in the utmost distress of mind, he 
 sent me an incorrect note written by himself with 
 a pencil, of which the following- is an exact copy : 
 " J/ Mr. Ives will consider the disorder a son 
 must be in when he is told he is dying and is 
 yet in doubt whether his father is not in as good 
 a state of health. If Mr. Ives is not too busy to 
 honour this chitt [short note], which nothing but 
 the greatest uneasiness could draw front me. 
 The boy waits an answer'' ' 
 
 The incoherent appeal scrawled by a rushlight, 
 and with almost the last flicker of the boyish brain 
 amid the reeking night-fumes of the hospital, 
 quickly brought the doctor to the bedside. ' He 
 then began with me. "And is he dead ?" "Who, my 
 dear?" "My father, sir." "No, my love; nor is he 
 in any danger, I assure you. He is almost well." 
 " Thank God, then why did THEY tell me so ? I am 
 now satisfied and ready to die ! " He begged my 
 pardon for having (as he obligingly and tenderly 
 expressed himself) disturbed me at so early an 
 hour, and' — died. 
 
 He sleeps in brave company. Our Calcutta 
 graveyards, indeed, are sown so thick with heroes
 
 32 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 as to leave small space for separate monuments. 
 A cenotaph hard by was set up on twelve pillars in 
 memory of a like number of officers who fell in a 
 desperate conflict with the Rohillas in 1796. In- 
 side there is a platform designed for some military 
 trophy, never erected. Nor was there even a list of 
 their names nor any epitaph until a hundred years 
 later, when the Government in 1895 placed the 
 present inscription. The brave little midshipman, 
 ' Billy ' Speke, lies not far from a tomb which 
 thriftily commemorates two founders of our Indian 
 Empire. A slab within its recess bears the name 
 of the patriotic surgeon, Hamilton, who in 171 5 
 asked as fee from an Emperor a grant of privileges 
 to his countrymen. Another slab records in 1693 
 the death of Charnock, the originator of Calcutta. 
 One sepulchre now suffices for the founder and 
 the benefactor of the British capital of India. 
 
 It is difficult to say whether the founder or the 
 benefactor fared worse at the hands of those whom 
 they served. Of Surgeon William Hamilton, de- 
 scribed in the Calcutta burial register by the 
 honourable title of Physician, the tablet truly says 
 that ' his memory ought to be dear to this nation.'
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 33 
 
 As a matter of fact, while he was curing the Delhi 
 Emperor at the risk of his own life if the operation 
 went wrong-, and exhausting his credit with his 
 august patient to obtain indulgences for the English 
 Company, his Honourable Masters had, in a fit of 
 parsimony on the other side of the globe, done 
 away with his appointment, and ordered ' the dis- 
 charge of Dr. Hamilton on his return from Court.' 
 
 From this ingratitude the Directors were spared 
 partly by the fear of losing Hamilton's influence 
 with the Emperor, and partly by Hamilton's death. 
 ' Finding by the letters before us,' they wrote 
 grudgingly in their Bengal despatch of January 
 1 71 7, 'how successful he hath been in curing the 
 Great Mogul, which very probably will help for- 
 ward our negociations and get an easier grant of 
 some of our requests, we now say that if Dr. Hamil- 
 ton shall desire a continuance in our service, you 
 readily consent to it, and let him see you are 
 sensible of the benefit accruing to us, if you find 
 he any hath, by his undertaking and accomplishing 
 that cure.' 
 
 The noble doctor was saved from putting to the 
 test these tardy good intentions. The Emperor, 
 
 C
 
 34 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 reluctant to part with the man who had given him 
 back health, loaded him with gifts, among them 
 ' models of all his surgical instruments in pure gold.' 
 At length the Physician, said the Persian inscription 
 on his original grave-stone, ' having made his name 
 famous in the four quarters of the earth by the cure 
 of the Emperor, the Asylum of the World, and with 
 a thousand difficulties having obtained permission 
 from the Imperial Court, which is the Refuge of 
 the Universe, to return to his own country, by the 
 Divine decree on the fourth of December, 171 7, died 
 in Calcutta, and is buried here.' The epitaph was 
 evidently written, the grave-stone was perhaps paid 
 for, by some grateful Moslem friend. 
 
 The story of the founder of Calcutta is even a 
 more sorrowful one. Job Charnock went to India 
 in 1655 or 1656, and got a five years' engage- 
 ment under the Company. His Honourable Masters 
 in England soon discovered his value, and retained 
 him in their service by appointing him chief of the 
 Patna Factory, probably in 1664. There he re- 
 mained until 1680, married a Hindu wife, and 
 adopted customs of the natives around him. The 
 lady is said to have been a girl-widow of good
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 35 
 
 caste, whom he rescued at the risk of his own life 
 while she was being- led out to her husband's funeral 
 pyre. Cut off by her re-marriage from orthodox 
 Hinduism, she appears to have joined one of the 
 sects which in India mitigated the harshness of 
 the caste system by holding out a fresh start to the 
 unfortunate and the out-caste. After many wedded 
 years Charnock cherished her memory by an anni- 
 versary sacrifice of a cock upon her tomb: an 
 adaptation from the rites of the Five Saints of 
 Behar, the province in which he had rescued and 
 married her. In 1680 he was promoted to the 
 more central charge of the Company's house of 
 business near the modern Murshidabad, with the 
 claim to succeed as chief of all the factories in 
 Bengal at Hugli town. 
 
 To Charnock fell the perilous task of setding 
 the position of the English towards the native 
 powers. We had gone to India in 1600 as simple 
 traders, and during three quarters of a century 
 we trafficked as peaceably as we could under the 
 protection of the Mughal Empire. But before 
 1680 the decay of that Empire had set in, and the 
 Emperor could no longer shield our factories from 
 
 C2
 
 36 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 the oppressions of his own provincial deputies. It 
 was not so much the want of will on the part of 
 the central Mughal Government to deal fairly with 
 the foreigners who proved so profitable to its 
 exchequer. It was the want of power. Gradually 
 the English agents were forced to the conclusion 
 that if they were to remain in India they must 
 defend themselves. Charnock had struggled against 
 the exactions and extortions of the native officials 
 for thirty years. More than once he saw his 
 masters' property despoiled. He himself was said 
 to have suffered the indignity of the lash by com- 
 mand of a local ruler. In 1686 he slipped through 
 the cordon of soldiers who had surrounded his 
 factory near Murshidabad, and assumed charge of 
 the Company's head-quarters in Bengal, at Hugli 
 town. He stood forth as the champion of the 
 new maxim, which then began to be adopted by 
 our countrymen in India, that ' A fort is better 
 than an ambassador.' 
 
 In converting this phrase into a reality, Charnock 
 spent the remaining seven years of his hard and 
 harassed life. Worn out by thirty years of un- 
 broken labour in the tropics, he had already been ^
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 37 
 
 once superseded from home in his claim to the 
 chief charge of the Company's affairs in Bengal, 
 and he was destined to again suffer the same in- 
 justice. By 1686, however, even his Honourable 
 Masters in London realized that their only choice 
 on the Hugli river lay between self-defence and 
 flight. As the native governors, they wrote, have 
 ' got the knack of trampling upon us, and extorting 
 what they please of our estate from us by the 
 besieging of our Factorys and stopping of our boats 
 upon the Ganges, they will never forbear doing so 
 till we have made them as sensible of our power 
 as we have of our truth and justice.' They ac- 
 cordingly obtained leave from King James the 
 Second to commence hostilities, and in 1686 sent 
 out a force to be placed under Charnock's command 
 in Bengal. 
 
 Their plan was to exact redress by capturing 
 the Mughal ships, or failing that, to abandon 
 their head-quarters in Hugli town, and seize and 
 fortify a position near the mouth of the river, or 
 at Chittagong further east along the Bay. The 
 worthy Directors in London had a very vague idea 
 as to where Chittagong really was, and it did not
 
 38 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 occur to them that their scheme would cut them off 
 from the internal commerce of Bengal. Charnock 
 at once saw that what the proposed new settlement 
 might gain in safety it must lose in trade. The 
 problem before him was to find a place secure 
 from attack, yet commanding the traffic of the 
 Ganges. 
 
 This problem he solved in spite of difficulties 
 and discouragements such as no other founder of 
 British rule in India has had to overcome. There 
 is a reach of the Hugli river, twenty-seven miles 
 below Hugli town and about eighty miles from the 
 sea, where the stream scoops for itself a long deep 
 pool — now the port of Calcutta. The place was 
 early known to the Portuguese, whose galliasses 
 from 1530 onwards anchored there, to transfer 
 cargo to country craft, and so avoid the further 
 dangers of the river which shallows above the pool. 
 
 On the arrival of the fleet from Goa each year, 
 a bazaar of mat huts sprang up on the west bank 
 of the river. On the departure of the Portuguese 
 vessels, after transhipping their cargo, the mat huts 
 were burned down, and the place returned to 
 solitude until the return of the Goa fleet in the
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 39 
 
 next season. In course of time some mean mud 
 hovels, known as Sutanati Hat, literally 'Cotton 
 Thread Mart,' struggled into existence on the 
 eastern bank for the sale of the country-made yarns 
 and cloths. Protection was given, during the 
 better days of the Mughal Empire, by a petty fort 
 on either side of the river below the pool, as a 
 defence against water-pirates and land- marauders. 
 But the poor mud hamlet of ' Cotton Mart ' on the 
 east bank appeared scarcely less insignificant than 
 the bazaar of mat huts which was annually set up and 
 burned down on the western edge of the channel. 
 
 It seemed as if nature had determined that the 
 reach should be one of anchorage only, and no 
 abiding-place for man. From the west bank 
 stretched a country ravaged by great rivers during 
 a third of the year, and open during the other 
 two-thirds to the banditti of the most turbulent 
 districts of southern Bengal. If the traders who 
 flocked together to supply the Goa fleet had not 
 burned down their mat huts, the raiders from the 
 west would have promptly saved them the trouble. 
 
 The eastern side of the river appeared even more 
 impracticable for human habitation. One or two
 
 40 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 families of Sets and Baisaks, indeed, settled at the 
 Cotton Mart on the high east bank overlooking 
 the river. But that bank sloped down behind into 
 a swampy jungle, which at places came right to 
 the river-edge. At others there was a strip of 
 fairly raised ground between the river and the 
 swamp, a strip nowhere then exceeding a mile in 
 breadth. Behind it spread the vast agglomeration 
 of brackish lagoons now known, within their cur- 
 tailed limits, as the Salt Water Lakes — a pestilent 
 region long given up to the tiger and the crocodile. 
 By creeks through the narrow strip of high ground 
 along the river bank, the fetid ooze from these 
 fens swayed backward and forward with the rise 
 and fall of the tide. 
 
 The truth is that an old channel of the Ganges, 
 which took off eastwards from the Hugli a httle 
 below Cotton Mart Hamlet, had silted up during 
 the three previous centuries. By 1686 it had 
 dwindled into a line of shallow ponds, and no 
 longer sufficed to draw off the mass of water from 
 the brackish fens. A drowned land was thus 
 formed, at that time stretching over a hundred 
 square miles, shut off from its old exit southwards
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 4I 
 
 towards the sea, and poisoning with its stagnant 
 slush the country around. Yet this very region oi 
 swamp rendered the Hugli bank at Cotton Mart 
 unapproachable by troops from the east, Charnock 
 saw that a European Power which dared the un- 
 healthiness of the spot, and whose ships commanded 
 the river, would, whatever it suffered from nature, 
 be safe from the attack of man. 
 
 There is a story of how the old man landed at 
 the place, and sat under a great tree pondering on 
 its possibilities for a settlement. But the facts need 
 no aid from legend. His Honourable Masters had 
 sent him four hundred men, with orders to make 
 war upon an empire that counted its armies by 
 millions, and whose garrison in the outlying fort of 
 Hugli alone numbered 3,300 horse and foot. He 
 knew that half a century before, in 1632, the 
 Mughal troops destroyed the Portuguese settle- 
 ment at Hugli — a settlement far more powerful 
 than the little company of Englishmen under his 
 command — and carried off the whole Portuguese 
 population as slaves a thousand miles inland. But 
 he had small time for reflection. On October 28, 
 1686, a street fight between three of his soldiers
 
 42 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 and the market people in Hugli town ended In 
 a general attack. Charnock beat off the native 
 garrison, and after fruitless negotiation put the 
 Company's goods and servants on board his ships, 
 dropped down the river twenty-seven miles, and 
 anchored in the long deep pool opposite Cotton 
 Mart Hamlet. 
 
 During the four following months he made some 
 sort of settlement on the high river bank, and even 
 hoped for permission to build a fort. But in Feb- 
 ruary, 1687, the Imperial forces began to press 
 upon him from above. After a gallant fight he 
 had again to take to his ships and seek shelter 
 about seventy miles further down the river, near its 
 mouth. There he tried to fortify himself at Hijill, 
 which, although on the east bank, was protected to 
 landward by a network of swamps and creeks. 
 A high dyke now circles the region like the ram- 
 part of a Roman camp, and defends it to some 
 extent from inundation. It was then but half 
 rescued from the sea, ' having a great store of wild 
 hogs, deer, wild buffaloes and tigers,' at places 
 fertile, but so malarious that it passed into a 
 Hindustani proverb.
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 43 
 
 In this weird land, where the Company's ser- 
 vants had stalked big game in happier days, 
 Charnock and his four hundred sought refuge 
 at the end of February, 1687. He seized a litde 
 fort, but the Nawab's army again closed upon 
 him with 12,000 men. In three months Charnock 
 buried two hundred of his soldiers, only one hun- 
 dred remained fit to bear arms, many of them but 
 living skeletons, almost all of them emaciated with 
 fever and ague. Of forty officers, only himself and 
 one lieutenant with four sergeants were alive and 
 able for duty. Their principal ship sprang another 
 great leak, and the end seemed to have come, when 
 a vessel hove in sight from England with seventy 
 fresh men on board. 
 
 Charnock, who had been the soul of the defence, 
 now obtained honourable terms of capitulation. 
 On June 11, 1687, he marched out the remnant of 
 his men, gaunt and ragged, but with drums beating 
 and colours flying. After trying another place, 
 Ulabaria halfway up the river, for three months, he 
 once more anchored in the long deep pool oppo- 
 site Cotton Mart Hamlet. Here he again opened 
 negotiations for leave to build a fort on the eastern
 
 44 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 bank, and meanwhile stoudy set to work with brick 
 and lime on the river edge which was destined to 
 become Calcutta. 
 
 For a year he laboured at the double task of 
 buying a treaty from the Nawab, and erecting 
 a factory in anticipation of it. The rugged veteran 
 seems to have been quite unconscious that he was 
 doing anything heroic. His Honourable Masters, 
 indeed, so far from thanking him, marvelled at 
 'your insensible patience' under the oppressions 
 of the native viceroy. Nor were they ' without 
 great fear that your backwardness and hankering 
 after your profitable, easy old habitations [at Hugh 
 town], as the Israelites did after the onions and 
 garlick of Egypt, may deprive us of the fruit of all 
 our cost.' As to his magnificent defence of Hijili, 
 ' it was not your wit or contrivance, but God Al- 
 mighty's good providence, which hath always 
 graciously superintended the affairs of the Com- 
 pany,' to which he owed his deliverance. So in 
 1688 they sent out a hot-headed sea-captain to 
 supersede the old man, with a plan of campaign 
 drawn up in a London counting-house. 
 
 Charnock had now tried four places on the
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 45 
 
 river: Hugli town, 100 miles from the sea; Ula- 
 baria, literally ' the abode of owls,' halfway down ; 
 Hijili, near the mouth ; and twice over the long 
 pool at Cotton Mart, with its high eastern bank 
 protected by swamps to the landward. With infinite 
 labour and endurance of misery through the hot 
 weather and the drenching rains of 1688, he hutted 
 his fever-stricken followers, and began some poor 
 defensive works. To him arrived on September 20, 
 1688, Captain Heath with a reproachful despatch 
 from the Directors, and orders to load their goods 
 once more on ship and to sail for Chittagong. 
 
 Charnock pleaded hard for his rising settlement. 
 The despatch grudgingly provided that if he had 
 already fortified some smtable place, their servants 
 might stay there, ' since we can't now help it.' With 
 the aid of this argument he managed to delay 
 the catastrophe for seven weeks. But Captain 
 Heath, although a skilful navigator, had not the 
 eye of genius with which Charnock, and Clive after 
 him, discerned the strength of the high eastern 
 bank of the Calcutta pool alike for commerce and 
 for war. After much wrangling and several sudden 
 changes of mind, the impetuous sailor put Char-
 
 46 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 nock with the Company's other servants and goods 
 on board, and sailed away, leaving the factors at 
 the inland stations, and even our envoys at the 
 Nawab's Court, to their fate. 
 
 He had but a hazy notion as to whither he was 
 going. His Honourable Masters distinctly ordered 
 him to capture Chittagong. But their despatch 
 from London shows that they fancied he would 
 find that place somewhere ' up the great Ganges ! ' 
 As a matter of fact, it lay on a little river far to the 
 east, and was cut off from the inland Gangetic 
 trade. During three months Heath prowled round 
 the Bay of Bengal with the Company's whole 
 Bengal establishment on board, sacked and burned 
 a sea-coast town, looked in at Chittagong only to 
 find it defended by 10,000 men, vainly offered his 
 services to the Arrakan king, and after again 
 abandoning an envoy, sought refuge in a rage at 
 Madras. His overcrowded human cargoes had 
 been dying of scurvy, and in February, 1689, as 
 he himself writes, he gave ' orders for each ship to 
 make the best of her way.' 
 
 At Madras, Charnock, with the other Bengal 
 servants of the Company, abode in a sort of exile
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 47 
 
 for fifteen weary months. But the indefatigable 
 Nestor soon set to work to patch up the ruin which 
 Heath had brought to the settlement in Bengal. 
 After long negotiations, the refugees were allowed 
 to return. It was a perilous step ; even Charnock 
 hesitated for a moment, and the sturdy Welsh chap- 
 lain Evans of the Bengal establishment preferred 
 to remain at Madras for a season, to preach and 
 trade in safety. At length, on Sunday, August 24, 
 1690, at noon, Charnock and his Council and fac- 
 tors, for the third time, anchored in the long pool 
 of the Hugli river at Cotton Mart. They ' found 
 the place,' says their Consultation Book under that 
 date, ' in a deplorable condition, nothing being left 
 for our present accommodation, and the rain falling 
 day and night.' With a poor guard of thirty 
 soldiers all told, they scrambled up the steep mud- 
 bank which was thenceforward, without a break, to 
 grow into the British capital of India. 
 
 If Charnock had given a thought to his ease he 
 would have sailed on to Hugli town, and settled 
 there under the assurances of the now friendly 
 viceroy. But he knew the value of such assurances, 
 which, although they might hold good long enough
 
 48 THE THACKERAYS IN INPIA 
 
 for individuals to make a fortune, formed no per- 
 manent guarantee to the Company. He turned 
 a deaf ear alike to native persuasions and the 
 clamours of his own countrymen, who longed for 
 their houses and gardens in Hugli town, and for the 
 private trade there which alone rendered Indian 
 service bearable. He had had enough of ' fenceless 
 factories,' and, in spite of shattered health, he 
 resolved to bequeath to his masters a stronghold 
 that should be better than an ambassador, even if 
 he perished in the attempt. He perished : but not 
 until, by two more years of endurance, he had 
 founded Calcutta. 
 
 They were two miserable years. The buildings 
 which he set up in 1688 with so much labour and 
 peril had been plundered and burnt. Three ruined 
 mud hovels alone remained on the high river-bank. 
 Through the pitiless rains of 1690 he struggled 
 sternly on, although the declaration of war by 
 England against the French, whose setdement lay 
 twenty-four miles higher up the river, seemed to 
 make his efforts the mere obstinacy of a dotard. 
 In the scorching summer of 1691 an official de- 
 spatch describes him and his desponding Council as
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 49 
 
 Still dwelling in ' only tents, hutts, and boats.' It is 
 not surprising that he sent home ' an incomplete 
 cargo ' that year, for which the Company's governor 
 amid the plenty of Madras soundly rated him. 
 
 His own followers still sighed for their ' profitable, 
 easy old habitations ' at Hugli town, and saw with 
 chagrin a nest of interlopers flock thither under the 
 protection of the native ruler and monopolize their 
 private trade. Even as late as 1693, when Chaplain 
 Evans returned from his money-making and 
 preaching in Madras, it was not with the struggling 
 settlement at Calcutta but with the interlopers at 
 Hugli that the astute Welshman threw in his lot. 
 This active parson lived to take his wealth home to 
 England, was rapidly preferred to the see of Bangor, 
 and being translated thence to Armagh, the premier 
 bishopric of Ireland, died at a ripe age in the odour 
 of sanctity. 
 
 Yet in spite of everything Calcutta grew. When 
 once fortified, its position secured it on three sides 
 from attack. Its deep harbour attracted the trade 
 from the Dutch and French settlements on the 
 shallow reaches higher up the river, and the native 
 merchants began to crowd to a place where they 
 
 D
 
 50 . THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 felt safe. It was perceived that a few armed ships 
 in the Calcutta pool could cut off the upper settle- 
 ments from the sea. But the fever-haunted swamps 
 which stretched behind the high river-bank exacted 
 a terrible price for its prosperity. The name of 
 Calcutta, taken from a neighbouring Hindu shrine, 
 was identified by our mariners with Golgotha — the 
 place of skulls. Within a decade after Charnock 
 finally landed on the deserted river-bank in 1 690, it 
 had become a busy native mart with 1250 European 
 inhabitants, of whom 450 were buried between the 
 months of August and January in one year. The 
 miseries of the fever-stricken band throughout 1690 
 and 1 69 1 are not to be told in words. 
 
 By the middle of 1692 they had made firm their 
 footing. Indeed, the official records complain that 
 Charnock secured a larger investment for the Com- 
 pany in that year than he had funds to pay for. 
 The battle was won, but Charnock was not to enjoy 
 the victory. His last months were embittered by 
 a subordinate who taunted him with the new 
 Company about to be formed in England, and of 
 which ' he and not Charnock would be the chief in 
 Bengal.' A terror of getting enmeshed within the
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 51 
 
 distant jurisdiction of the Madras court paralyzed 
 his action and haunted his bedimmed mind. The 
 shadows of coming night settled heavily on the 
 worn-out man. He grew moody and savage. The 
 government slipped from him into unworthy 
 hands. His closing days were unlovely and un- 
 loved. On January 10, 1693, they buried him in 
 a grim enclosure, destined in the next century to 
 become the site of the Old Cathedral of Calcutta. 
 
 What little the English world knew of him was 
 for long made up of stories of his last morose 
 years, told by interlopers who hated him, and by 
 an unworthy successor who failed to discern what 
 he had achieved. Even Orme, the most careful of 
 Indian historians, misled by the old style date on 
 his tomb, gives a wrong year for his death — an 
 error followed, I believe, by all writers down to 
 1888. Charnock now stands forth in the manu- 
 script records as a block of rough hewn British 
 manhood. Not a beautiful personage perhaps, for 
 the founders of England's greatness in India 
 were not such as wear soft raiment and dwell in 
 kings' houses ; but a man who had a great and 
 hard task to do, and who did it — did it with small 
 D 2
 
 52 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 thought of self, and with a resolute courage which 
 no danger could daunt nor any difficulties turn 
 aside. 
 
 The masters who treated him so grudgingly 
 knew his worth. He was even in his lifetime 
 our ' honest Mr. Charnock ' ; no ' prowler for him- 
 self beyond what was just and modest.' But the 
 inscription on his tomb, written, let us hope, by 
 Chaplain Evans, bishop and merchant, mutely 
 appeals to a higher verdict than man's. He sleeps 
 ' in spe beatae resurrecttonis ad Christi tudicis 
 adventum ' — an exile 'qui postquam. in solo non 
 suo peregrinatMS esset diu, reversus est domum 
 suae aeternitatis.' He abides in the hope of a 
 joyful resurrection at the coming of Christ the 
 Judge : a wanderer who after long travel in a far 
 country has returned to his eternal home. Perhaps 
 his truest epitaph is a chance line in a despatch 
 from the Directors a year after his death — ' Always 
 a faithful Man to the Company.' 
 
 There he rests, CONDITOR URBIS, in the heart 
 of the vast hot city, with nigh a million human 
 beings surging around. On the one side tower 
 the buildings of the great Calcutta newspaper, with
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 53 
 
 the nightly whir of its steam -press. On the other 
 stands the Old Cathedral of St. John, with the 
 twitter of birds from its eaves at sunrise, and the 
 moving shadow of its steeple and chime of hours 
 throughout the glaring day. Tropical trees in 
 their unchanging greenness keep watch over all. 
 His tomb is the oldest piece of masonry above 
 ground in Calcutta. The graves of his contem- 
 poraries have long been covered by accretions of 
 soil and silt. The generations of dead Englishmen 
 who beat out their hard lives in Bengal through 
 the seventeenth century are sunk deep below the 
 siirface. They lie as remote from modern ken as 
 the tropical insect life that buzzed and fluttered in 
 the jungles which now form the peat-beds twenty 
 feet under Calcutta. 
 
 Thirty of their head-stones, dug up during 
 excavations or rescued from church repairs, were 
 formed into a paved terrace around Charnock's 
 mausoleum. For Surgeon Hamilton's, a place was 
 found within it. The finely raised letters on the 
 hard slabs give dates from 1693 to 1766. The 
 instinctive piety of later Englishmen has thus made 
 the founder's tomb the centre of a Campo Santo
 
 54 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 for the men who did England's work in Bengal, 
 and died, and were traduced or forgotten. 
 
 The very ground on which they struggled and 
 suffered has disappeared. The old foundations of 
 forts, factories, council-chambers, and churches lie 
 buried one under the other — silently obliterated by 
 successive layers of silt. Even the site of the Black 
 Hole was unknown until revealed by recent excava- 
 tions. Calcutta rises phoenix-like above her ruins, 
 with the Hugh river as her one unchanging land- 
 mark, recalling a yet more august scene of decay 
 and new birth : 
 
 Ne ought save Tyber hastning to her fall 
 Remaines of all : O world's inconstancie ! 
 That which is firme doth flit and fall away. 
 That which is flitting doth abide and stay. 
 
 Envy and evil-speaking are now so happily 
 abated in India, and backbiting, like a good 
 Christian's charity, is so scrupulously done in secret, 
 that a man has only to be sure of himself to live 
 unperturbed by the rancour of rivals or the jealousy 
 of friends. Defamation itself takes refuge in 
 negatives. But from the calumnies of cliques these 
 dead men had no outside appeal. They could not
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 55 
 
 pay back detraction with contempt. An iron- 
 hooped orbit of oflScialism hemmed in their only 
 known sphere of public life. Until India passed 
 to the Crown in 1858, England troubled herself 
 little about Indian administration, save once in 
 twenty years at the successive wrangles over the 
 Company's charter. For a full century after 
 Charnock founded Calcutta, the power of the Press 
 was unknown in Bengal. 
 
 Nor, indeed, did that power at first prove for 
 good. The earliest Calcutta newspaper, Hjcky's 
 Bengal Gazette ( 1 780), was proscribed, not unjustly, 
 within its first ten months, after which no copy 
 might pass through the Post Office. Its later 
 numbers, nauseous mixtures of dullness and in- 
 decency, were written and edited in jail. During 
 fifty years its successors uttered their feeble voices 
 in peril of deportation and under menace of the 
 censor's rod. Scurrility and servility, indeed, long 
 seemed the only two notes known to Calcutta 
 journalism. Who could have foreseen that those 
 cat-callings of bugle-boys, practising their prentice 
 windpipes in some out-of-the-way angle of the 
 ramparts, were destined to grow into clear trumpet
 
 56 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 notes which should arouse sleeping camps to great 
 constitutional 'struggles, and sound the charge of 
 political parties in battle ? 
 
 In place of the free praise or blame of public 
 opinion, these dead men might obtain an entry in 
 The Bengal Obituary^ if their friends paid for a 
 tombstone. That compilation was printed in 1848 
 by a worthy firm of Calcutta undertakers who, with 
 a view to trade, traced the origin of monuments to 
 ' the Universal Deluge, when the Rainbow was 
 made or selected as a standing token.' It piously 
 encouraged the public to ' proper sepulture ' by the 
 argument of ' the Resurrection of the Body.' Its 
 inscriptions from the old Calcutta burial-grounds 
 and the rural graveyards of Northern India, dating 
 with a few exceptions from 1768 onwards, form the 
 sole memorial of many a brave soldier and manful 
 ruler of districts. 
 
 We forget the harsh judgments passed on our 
 predecessors in India while turning over these pious 
 flatteries from their tombs. Perhaps the truth lies 
 between the two legends. We learn, at any rate, 
 that amid the unbeautiful life of Calcutta a century 
 and a half ago, mo theirs sorrowed for little children
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES ^ 57 
 
 in the same tender words of Scripture which they 
 still use, that fair wives died young, and that men 
 went to their graves convoyed by troops of friends. 
 What a record here, too, of hopes shattered, ambi- 
 tions wrecked, and promise unfulfilled ! The collapse 
 of the banking houses in Calcutta, with their 
 failure for seventeen millions sterling between 1830 
 and 1 834, involved in one gigantic ruin the military 
 and civilian families of Bengal. Some of the old 
 names survive in the two great Services, but many 
 went down in the flood, or were cast up as jetsam 
 in subordinate branches of public employ. Very 
 few, like the Thackerays, still flourish numerously 
 not only in their own name but through branching 
 female lines. The undertaker's volume preserves 
 the epitaphs of the multitude that have disappeared. 
 The noble Service which formed the governing 
 body in India has, in one respect, suffered most. 
 Our early wars still move before us in the living 
 pages of Orme. The Bengal army, the Madras 
 army, the Company's artillery and navy has each 
 its separate historian ; the soldier politicals have 
 an honourable literature of their own. The Indian 
 Civil Service has found no annalist. If an Indian
 
 58 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 administrator happened to belong to some close 
 evangelical borough at Madras or Serampur, he 
 received the doubtful honours of an ' improving ' 
 biography. Otherwise he passed to his grave 
 unknown, unless some one had something to say 
 against him. Till Bosworth Smith's Life of Lord 
 Lawrence awakened by its manly narrative the 
 interest of England, the world heard little good of 
 Indian civilians except in sectarian memoirs, or In 
 the more disastrous panegyrics of filial piety. 
 
 For this, the two principles of the old Civil 
 Service, patronage and seniority, were in part to 
 blame. All seniority services are jealous of ex- 
 ceptional success. In the army, the principle of 
 seniority is tempered by the battle-field and the 
 brevet. The old Bengal Civil Service had no such 
 sanctions for short-cuts to greatness, and it regarded 
 brilliancy of any sort with a coldly distrustful eye. 
 Its esprit de corps was the esprit de corps of 
 aunts, sisters, and cousins ; a family feeling which 
 bound with feminine withes many a strong man's 
 hands, but which had small sympathy for talent 
 without relatives, and made no defence for it if 
 it fell
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 59 
 
 The only amends that these poor dead civilians 
 could offer to their Service for exceptional ability 
 was an early death. It was an apology at once 
 pathetic and complete. Yet even the name of 
 Augustus Clevland, the dulce decus of the old 
 Bengal Civil Service, has been misspelt during 
 a century ; and the date of Vans Agnew's burial 
 on the summit of a captured citadel remained 
 incomplete, when I last read his Calcutta cathedral 
 tablet, as ' 184-.' The neglect of our countrymen's 
 graves in India long formed a reproach to the 
 British name. Perhaps it still does. If the early 
 English in Calcutta stoned their prophets, their 
 successors grudged a little quicklime to whiten 
 their tombs. 
 
 In the same graveyard in which Francis laid his 
 wrathful colleagues to rest, a tapering column with 
 a spiral fluting round it commemorates a poet's early 
 love. The faint lettering on its tablet bears the 
 name of Rose Aylmer, whose beauty and sweetness 
 for a time brought calm to Landor's troubled spirit. (/^oJL(jC>^ 3flurt3 
 After his mishap at Oxford, and having quitted his 
 father's house as he vowed ' for ever,' Landor sought 
 retirement on the Welsh coast in 1 796. There he
 
 6o THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 found kindness from Lord Aylmer's family, and 
 chiefly from the gifted daughter Rose. 
 
 He was about twenty-one : she barely seventeen. 
 The most gracefully tender of his poems tell the 
 old tale ; the joyous awakening of young hearts ; 
 the rambles by wood and shore; his briar-torn hand 
 which she bound up ; the tune she softly sang — 
 ' How close I bent I quite forget, I only know I hear 
 it yet.' It was a book which Rose lent him that 
 struck the first true outflash of Landor's genius 
 in Gebir, ' Sold for a shilling, it has miraculous 
 beauties,' wrote St)uthey of that almost forgotten 
 work. ' I would go a hundred miles to see the 
 anonymous author.' Then came the warning voice, 
 ' Whispering happy as thou art. Happiness and 
 thou must part.' Lady Aylmer married a second 
 time, and Rose was sent out to her aunt, Ladj?^ 
 Russell, in Calcutta. A pathetic verse of Landor 
 hints that she went not of her own choice. 
 
 Whatever her secret sorrow, she had not to bear 
 it long. The Calcutta Gazette of the first week 
 of March, 1800, records her death — aged twenty, 
 says the tombstone. ' Her noble name she never 
 changed,' wrote Landor, ' Nor was her nobler
 
 SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES 6l 
 
 heart estranged.' The news fell on hira midway in 
 his erratic youth. For days and nights her image 
 never left his brain. During hours of sleeplessness 
 he wrote the elegy which enshrines in a casket of 
 pearl the name of Rose Aylmer as long as maiden 
 hearts shall ache and the English language endure : 
 
 Ah what avails the sceptred race? 
 
 Ah what the form divine ? 
 What every virtue, every grace ? 
 
 Rose Aylmer, all were thine. 
 Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 
 
 May weep but never see, 
 A night of memories and of sighs 
 
 I consecrate to thee. 
 
 How various the fates which these Calcutta grave- 
 yards chronicle ! Not far from Rose Aylmer's 
 tapering column, George Foley, the brilliant young 
 civilian sent in 1786 against the recalcitrant Rajas 
 and * armed multitude ' of the west, lies with but 
 a name and date, and a pitiful little epitaph in 
 half-caste French : ' Ce monument est construit par 
 une Amie.' The amaranth of Love Lies Bleeding 
 blooms ever amid our deserts of death. Its very 
 name of amaranth springs from the same root as 
 the Indian word for Immortality. 
 
 In the Calcutta cemeteries, as in our Station
 
 62 THE THACKERAY S IN INDIA 
 
 graveyards throughout Bengal, the tiny graves rise 
 close. The price of the British rule in India 
 has always been paid in the lives of little children. 
 To many of the early fathers of Calcutta the curse 
 on the rebuilder of Jericho came bitterly home : 
 ' He shall lay the foundation thereof in his first- 
 born, and in his youngest son shall he set up the 
 gates of it.' Certain families seem, indeed, to have 
 been specially singled out for this sorrow. In the 
 same South Park Street graveyard, each genera- 
 tion of the Bayleys during the first half of the 
 century laid a child; one of them burying two 
 infant sons within two years. 
 
 Young or old, whether torn from the sobbing 
 mother's breast, or calmly garnered in the ripeness 
 of years, defacing time has dealt impartially with 
 their tombs. The places are very desolate. Some of 
 the monuments are in ruins, some coarsely patched 
 up, others have been levelled with the ground. 
 From many the inscription slabs have fallen out, 
 and the names and dates can only be gathered 
 from The Bengal Obituary. That pathetically 
 stolid jumble now forms the best record of a century 
 of tenderness and greatness and grief.
 
 [ 63 ] 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 
 
 Fashionable Park Street appears in the map 
 of Calcutta for 1 794 as Burial Ground Road. But 
 Sir Elijah Impey, when Chief Justice, had located 
 himself with magnificence on its southern edge, 
 near the present Loretto Convent, and turned the 
 adjacent waste into a deer-park. Other stately 
 mansions sprang up around his enclosure. A later 
 Chief Justice, Sir Henry Russell, to whose wife 
 poor Rose Aylmer was sent about 1 798, built the 
 palace which gave its name to Russell Street on 
 the west of Sir Elijah's pleasure-grounds. Camac 
 Street was cut out of their eastern margin, and 
 houses gradually filled up the intervening space. 
 Impey 's old deer-park thus grew into the crowded 
 May fair of Calcutta, and the route along its northern 
 side to the graveyards was euphemized from Burial 
 Ground Road into Park Street. 'All funeral 
 processions,' says an early Calcutta writer, ' are
 
 64 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 concealed as much as possible from the sight of the 
 ladies, that the vivacity of their tempers may not 
 be wounded.' 
 
 On September 13, 181 5, a train of merchants, 
 soldiers, and dignitaries defiled along that road 
 behind the coffin of a civilian struck down midway 
 in his career. I wonder if the chief mourner was 
 a pale-faced little boy of four, who has come to 
 be known in all English-speaking lands as the 
 great-hearted satirist of our age, and the prime 
 master of our full-grown English tongue? For 
 it was the father of William Makepeace Thackeray 
 whom Calcutta was escorting to his grave. 
 
 The year 18 15 had been a death-dealing one to 
 the Thackerays in Bengal. It opened with the 
 news that the younger brother of the just deceased 
 Richmond Thackeray was fallen in a desperate fight 
 in Nepal. On August 14 Richmond headed the 
 funeral procession of his cousin Henry to the military 
 burial-ground in the southern suburb of Calcutta. 
 And now within a month, on September 13, Rich- 
 mond was himself carried forth for burial. 
 
 The Thackerays formed a typical family of the 
 Bengal Civil Service in the days of John Company.
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 65 
 
 They threw out branches into the sister services, 
 military and medical, and by a network of inter- 
 marriages created for themselves a ruling connexion 
 both in India and in the Court of Directors at home. 
 The first Thackeray in India went as a covenanted 
 civilian in 1 766, and four of his sons, with at least 
 fourteen of his descendants and collaterals, have 
 been traced in the same profession. While wander- 
 ing over the three Presidencies, I noted down some 
 of their many appearances in the old manuscript 
 records, from the Malabar coast on -the extreme 
 south-west to the Sylhet valley in the far north- 
 east of India. No published account exists of them ; 
 but I have been allowed to make use of a private 
 Family Book of the Thackerays, compiled chiefly 
 by an aunt of the novelist. The two sets of 
 materials, when brought together from the Indian 
 archives and the domestic papers, furnish a curious 
 picture of one of those powerful and compact, but 
 now almost extinct, family corporations which did 
 so much to build up British rule in the East. 
 
 The ThackwaSjThackwras, or Thackerays, emerge 
 in 1336 as holding thirty acres and a dwelling-house 
 of the Abbot of St. Mary of Fountains. During 
 
 E
 
 GS THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 the reign of James the First a branch of them took 
 root at Hampsthwaite, a village in the West Riding 
 of Yorkshire. There, from about 1600 to 1804 
 when the last of this line died childless, they dwelt 
 as small owners, living in a manly way on the 
 fringe of the moorland. From that modest home, 
 in January, 1706, a boy of twelve years started 
 southwards to be admitted as a King's Scholar at 
 Eton, and by due stages to become a Fellow of 
 King's College, Cambridge, an Eton master. Head- 
 master of Harrow, Chaplain to the Prince of Wales, 
 and Archdeacon of Surrey. He got his scholar- 
 ship at King's College in 1 71 1 , exactly one hundred 
 years before the birth of his great-grandson the 
 novelist. 
 
 The prosperous ecclesiastic married in 1729 
 a daughter of John Woodward, Lord of the 
 Manor of Butler's Marston, Warwickshire, and 
 during the next twenty years had sixteen children. 
 Indeed he accepted the Harrow head-mastership 
 in 1 746, on the birth of the fourteenth, chiefly with 
 a view to getting his sons educated. Harrow 
 School, although far on in its second century, had 
 declined, under ' a drunken, disorderly, idle ' head-
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 67 
 
 master, to thirty-three boys, a number which 
 increased to 130 during the vigorous rule of 
 Dr. Thomas Thackeray. He died in 1 760. 
 
 The heavily weighted widow thankfully accepted 
 a Writership in the East India Company's service 
 for her sixteenth and youngest child, William 
 Makepeace, born in 1 749. These two names formed 
 a favourite combination among several branches of 
 the Thapkerays ; derived, it is said, from a member 
 of the family burned for his faith in the days of 
 Queen Mary. William Makepeace Thackeray, 
 grandfather of the novelist, was placed at the age 
 of fourteen with a ' Writing- Master ' at Bromley-by-" 
 Bow, to learn book-keeping — at that time essential 
 for entering the Company's service. In August, 
 1765, his preceptor certified his capacity to the 
 Court of Directors in somewhat guarded terms. 
 
 He ' has been under my care and instruction since 
 midsummer, 1 764,' wrote this worthy, ' has gone 
 through a regular set of merchants' accounts and 
 the practical rules of arithmetic, and I believe he 
 understands what he has learned as well as most 
 young gentlemen of his age and experience.' Ac- 
 cordingly in February, 1766, the lad sailed by the 
 E 2
 
 68 THE THACF^RAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Lord Camden for Calcutta, with a family Bible 
 which his mother had used for fifty-three years, 
 and which she gave him as her parting gift. 
 The book has survived the many generations of 
 Thackerays since passed away. 
 
 By the same ship sailed another youthful Writer, 
 the son of Lord Sandwich and the celebrated 
 Miss Ray. The poor boy died on his voyage out. 
 A third was George Grand, the predestined hus- 
 band of the fair daughter of the Capitaine du Port 
 at Chandarnagar, whose seduction cost Sir Philip 
 Francis fifty thousand rupees in 1779, and who 
 ended her chequered career in 1835 ^ Princesse 
 de Talleyrand. I found myself on board the 
 Lord Camden^ wrote Mr. Grand in his Narrative 
 published at the Cape of Good Hope in 18 14, 
 'accommodated with eleven Writers, each with 
 a standing bed in the great cabin, not one of 
 which gentlemen, excepting Mr. John Makepeace 
 Thackeray of Hadley, is now (1802) living.' The 
 ' John ' is one of Mr. Grand's slips of memory. 
 
 The shipload of young civilians arrived in stirring 
 times. The previous year, 1765, had brought the 
 grant of Bengal from the Mughal Emperor to
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 69 
 
 the East India Company, followed by Clive's 
 despairing effort, as he said, 'to cleanse the 
 Augean stable' of Anglo-Indian abuses. The 
 elder civilians were banded against the Governor's 
 attack on their private trade, while the English 
 officers of the army formed a mutinous league 
 against his military retrenchments. ' The office of 
 Governor has been hunted down,' wrote Clive. 
 But the victor of Plassey kept his Bengal hounds at 
 bay, by bringing up four councillors from Madras, 
 and by filling his secretariat with youths fresh from 
 England. 
 
 Into this wild arena young Thackeray was 
 dropped, with his mother's Bible in his trunk. 
 His ' arrival as Writer ' is dated in the Company's 
 books, June 20, 1766, his seventeenth birthday, 
 although the Lord Camden did not actually reach 
 Calcutta till some weeks later. Placed with three 
 others of his shipmates in the Secretary's office, he 
 attracted the notice of his superiors, and was next 
 year promoted to be assistant treasurer or 'cash- 
 keeper ' under the new Governor, Verelst. In the 
 Company's pay-sheet for i "j^"] he draws Rs. 1 158 or 
 ;^i45 per annum, while most of the other Writers
 
 ^0 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 only receive ;^8o. Except during a brief appoint- 
 ment in the Calcutta Court, his first five years were 
 passed in the financial and correspondence de- 
 partments of the Government. Mr. Cartier, who 
 succeeded to the governorship of Bengal in 1769, 
 also employed him under his own eye. The first 
 use that Thackeray made of his promotion was to 
 relieve his widowed mother of the charge of two 
 of his sisters. On their arrival in Calcutta the 
 Governor behaved with fatherly kindness to the 
 youthful group. It was at his house that the elder 
 sister met her future husband. In the family 
 records Thackeray appears at this time as ' Secre- 
 tary to Mr. Cartier ' ; personal assistant would 
 more correctly describe his position. 
 
 That position gave him a thorough insight into 
 the mechanism of the Government. Clive had left 
 behind a dual system, under which the actual 
 administration remained apart from the superior 
 control. The actual administration continued in 
 the hands of the old native officials who collected 
 the revenue. The superior control was exercised 
 by a handful of Englishmen who could do litde 
 more than see the revenue duly forwarded to
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 71 
 
 head-quarters, and invest It in calicoes or other 
 country products for the yearly shipment home. 
 Their business was not to dispense justice to the 
 people, but to provide dividends for Leadenhall 
 Street. Their official grades as Factors, Junior 
 Merchants, Senior Merchants, Store-keepers and 
 Export Warehouse-keepers, expressed their real 
 duties. The profits on the Annual Investment 
 still formed the touchstone of merit. Even in 
 1772 Warren Hastings was chosen for the Bengal 
 governorship by reason of his good management 
 of the warehouses at Madras. 
 
 In conducting the Company's commerce, its 
 servants also did business on their own account. 
 Their nominal salaries scarcely yielded a sub- 
 sistence. These meagre stipends, which they looked 
 on as retainers rather than as pay, they aug- 
 mented sometimes a hundredfold by private trade 
 and by presents from natives. Clive, under orders 
 from the Court of Directors, forbad in 1765 the 
 acceptance of presents over Rs. 4,000, and tried to 
 restrict the private trade. During Thackeray's five 
 years in Calcutta, 1766 to 1771, the taking of 
 large presents began to be discreditable. But the
 
 72 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Court of Directors failed to enforce their prohibition 
 of private commerce. Indeed a general meeting of 
 the Company compelled them to reconsider their 
 decision, and their repeated orders led to a series 
 of compromises with a view to the regulation 
 rather than to the abolition of their Bengal servants' 
 trade. 
 
 The truth is, that the old system of nominal 
 salaries supplemented by private trade had advan- 
 tages which the general body of the Company was 
 unwilling to forego. It enabled it to do its business 
 with an appearance of economy highly appreciated 
 by the shareholders. The experience acquired 
 in private trade, it was also argued, made the 
 Company's servants keener merchants and better 
 agents for its Investment than they could become 
 by any other training. During Thackeray's 
 whole residence in Bengal the officials continued, 
 without social disapproval or self-reproach, to do 
 business on their own account. Sea-captains and 
 super-cargoes in like manner grew rich by carrying 
 private freight. Gerierals and regimental officers 
 retired with fortunes made from the supply of 
 clothing or commissariat to the troops.
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 73 
 
 This system, with its show of low salaries in the 
 ledgers at Leadenhall Street, opened a wide door to 
 abuses. Honourable men acted up to the standard 
 of public honour in their time ; dishonourable men 
 fell below it. Whatever success Thackeray had in 
 his early ventures, he conducted them under the eye 
 of the Governor, apparently from the Governor's 
 own house, and certainly in such a spirit as to retain 
 the confidence and esteem of his master. 
 
 After five years of training at the centre of 
 government, he was appointed to a more indepen- 
 dent position in the interior. The Governor, 
 Mr. Cartier, had spent his whole inland service at 
 Dacca, except when he volunteered as an ensign 
 with dive's army in 1757 after the Black Hole. 
 He knew the advantages of the place for private 
 trade, and he determined to give to his young 
 favourite the same opportunity of making a fortune 
 as he himself had enjoyed. In 1771 he accordingly 
 appointed Thackeray to be Factor and P'ourth in 
 Council at Dacca. The brother and two sisters 
 put themselves and their belongings into large 
 country boats, and wended their way eastwards 
 across the delta of the Ganges. The journey was
 
 74 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 a slow one amid tropical swamps and vast jungles, in 
 which the roar of the tiger could be heard through 
 the night, and his foot-prints seen at his drinking- 
 places in the morning. After days of rowing, and 
 poling, and towing from the banks, they emerged 
 on the confluence of waters over which Dacca 
 reigned as a queen. 
 
 That great city formed the Mughal capital of 
 Bengal in the seventeenth century. Shorn some- 
 what of its splendour by the removal of the Court 
 to Murshidabad in 1704, it remained in 1771 the 
 seat of a wealthy local nobility and the Company's 
 head-quarters in Eastern Bengal. Its situation at 
 the meeting of the deltas formed by the Ganges, 
 the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna gave it the 
 command of an inexhaustible commerce. A net- 
 work of rivers brought down to its landing-stairs 
 the products of the east, north, and west. Further 
 south, the united waters spread out into an inland 
 sea gradually opening upon the Bay of Bengal. 
 The approach to Dacca, with its towers, palaces, 
 temples and minarets, still unspoiled by time, formed 
 in the last century a sight never to be forgotten. 
 
 The Thackeray party consisted of the brother
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 75 
 
 aged twenty-two, sister Henrietta aged twenty-five, 
 and sister Jane aged thirty-two. Henrietta was 
 strikingly handsome; the elder sister, although not a 
 beauty, was a kind, unaffected woman, of whom her 
 mother predicted, ' If there's a sensible man in India, 
 he will find out Jane.' One of the most sensible 
 had already found her out while on a visit to 
 Governor Cartier in Calcutta, and was waiting at 
 Dacca to welcome her. 
 
 Among his eager, fortune-seeking countrymen 
 of the last century in Bengal, Major James Rennell 
 stands forth as an unique figoire — a calm, disin- 
 terested man of science. Born in 1 742, and having at 
 the age of five lost his father, an artillery captain, in 
 the campaign of the Pays Bas, James Rennell was 
 educated by the kindness of relatives, and entered 
 the navy at fourteen. Fortunate in quickly seeing 
 service, he still more distinguished himself by a 
 habit of drawing plans of whatever action his ship 
 was engaged in and of the ports which she visited. 
 When the peace of Paris in 1763 s^med to end 
 his chances in the British navy, he entered the 
 East India Company's fleet. In the following 
 year, 1 764, he received an ensign's commission in
 
 76 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 the Bengal Engineers from Governor Vansittart, 
 and was appointed surveyor of the Company's 
 dominions in Bengal. 
 
 In that position he remained, without seeking 
 promotion or concerning himself in money-making, 
 throughout his thirteen years of Indian service. 
 Indifferent to the vanities of social life, he kept a 
 staff of draughtsmen in Calcutta, but buried himself 
 in the recesses of Eastern Bengal to be near the 
 centre of his work. Year after year he studied 
 the great river- systems in which he discovered the 
 key to the geography of the country. He watched 
 their behaviour in the mighty floods of each rainy 
 season, measured the new silt-islands which they 
 deposited, and mapped out their altered courses 
 in the dry weather, until he wrested from them 
 their secrets as land-makers and land-destroyers, 
 at once the waterways, the soil-carriers, and the 
 race-dividers of Bengal, 
 
 On his labours our knowledge of the country 
 rests. After his return to England in 1777 they 
 won for him the highest rank among men of 
 science. Still refusing offers of advancement, he 
 quietly went on with his work until extreme
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 77 
 
 old age, content, in the words of the President 
 of the Royal Geographical Society, to be *the 
 leading geographer in England, if not in Europe, 
 for a period of fifty years.' Rennell now divides 
 his scientific supremacy with D'Anville of France 
 and Ritter of Germany, but enjoys an undis- 
 puted pre-eminence for many-sidedness gained by 
 practical work as a sailor, explorer, and surveyor 
 on land and on sea. 
 
 His researches extended over the whole world 
 and throughout all time, from ' The Geography of 
 Herodotus,' ' The Retreat of the Ten Thousand,' 
 St. Paul's shipwreck, and the topography of Babylon 
 and Troy, to the Delta of the Ganges, the mountains 
 of the Himalaya, the Gulf stream and Arctic cur- 
 rents, the Niger valley and Central Africa. It was he 
 who worked out the geographical interpretation 
 of Mungo Park's travels. All the honours of 
 science, from the Copley Gold Medal of the Royal 
 Society to Baron Walckenaer's magnificent e/o£^e 
 before the French Academy, Rennell reaped. For 
 other distinctions he cared nothing. He died in 
 1830 at the age of eighty-seven, and lies buried 
 in Westminster Abbey. ' Gentle, courteous, and
 
 78 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 simple minded,' writes Sir Clements Markham, ' he 
 was the type of a perfect English gentleman,' 
 
 This beautiful-souled man of science soon be- 
 came the avowed suitor of Jane Thackeray, The 
 year of her arrival with her brother and sister 
 in Dacca, however, nearly proved to be the year 
 of his death. The task of surveying Bengal had 
 to be carried out amid dangers from river-pirates, 
 herds of trampling elephants, and roaming hosts of 
 banditti, the fierce remnants of the native armies. 
 On one occasion Rennell saved himself from the 
 spring of a leopard only by thrusting a bayonet 
 down its throat. 
 
 In 1 766, five years before he met Jane Thackeray, 
 he had been literally cut to pieces by a band of 
 marauders, 800 strong. Having routed them in 
 a pitched battle, he came unexpectedly upon them 
 again the next morning with an escort too weak for 
 defence. One sabre-stroke ' cut his right shoulder- 
 blade through, and laid him open for nearly a foot 
 down the back, cutting through or wounding several 
 of the ribs.' A second slashed his left elbow, a third 
 pierced the arm, a fourth came down on his hand 
 depriving him for ever of the use of a forefinger,
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 79 
 
 besides lesser thrusts and hacks. In this mangled 
 state he had to be rowed three hundred miles in 
 a boat to the nearest surgeon at Dacca, with such 
 cataplasms of leaves and onions as the anxious 
 affection of his native servants could devise for 
 his wounds. After hanging for months between 
 life and death, he recovered, to find himself pro- 
 moted by Lord Clive to be Captain of Engineers 
 and Surveyor-General of Bengal, at the age of 
 twenty-four. 
 
 The long illness saved Rennell from a scarcely 
 less serious danger. For while he was slowly 
 alternating between fits of delirium and prostration, 
 the officers of the army conspired against Clive's 
 retrenchments. Careless about money himself, and 
 indeed exceptionally well provided for by a salary 
 amounting with allowances to ;^ 1,000 a year, 
 Rennell felt deeply for his less fortunate comrades. 
 His dying condition alone prevented him from 
 being taken into their mutinous league. ' It was 
 indeed,' he wrote, 'a lucky circumstance for me; 
 for no doubt I should have been carried away with 
 the stream, and should have entered into an associa- 
 tion which has been attended with disgrace to all
 
 8o THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 those concerned in it.' Though the retrenchments 
 bore lightly upon his large pay, merely reducing it 
 ^y £^74 P^^ annum, he did not hesitate to express 
 his opinion as to the wrong inflicted on his brethren - 
 in-arms. His letters home enable us to understand 
 how the transaction appeared to one of the few 
 Englishmen at that time in Bengal who was himself 
 indifferent to fortune. 
 
 ' In this affair,' Rennell wrote, ' we discover the 
 generosity of the Company to a set of men who 
 have conquered a territory equal in extent to the 
 kingdom of France, and this in a climate that 
 proves so prejudicial to European constitutions 
 that scarce one out of seventy men returns to his 
 native country. There is a passage in Rollin's 
 Anciefii History relating to the Carthaginians 
 disbanding their mercenary troops after those 
 troops had preserved the State from ruin, and 
 the reflection op it perfectly suits the East India 
 Company. "There," says RoUin, "you discover 
 the genius of a State composed of merchants who 
 make a traffic out of their fellow-creatures." ' 
 
 In 1 771, the year of the Thackerays' arrival at 
 Dacca, Rennell had again to disperse a wolfish
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 8l 
 
 army of marauders who were le\ying contributions 
 throughout Eastern Bengal. In fifteen days he 
 marched his force 320 miles across diflBcult country 
 under a blazing sun, scattered the enemy without 
 a blow, and returned to Dacca completely suc- 
 cessful, but with ' another violent attack of fever,' 
 says Sir Clements Markham, ' which nearly carried 
 him off.' His slow convalescence knit more closely 
 the tie between him and Jane Thackeray. In the 
 autumn they became engaged, and next year the 
 family party went on a visit to Mr. Cartier in 
 Calcutta. Jane was married from Mr. Cartier's 
 house to Major Rennell on October 15, 1772. 
 
 Henrietta Thackeray, as became a beauty, made 
 a more brilliant match. The Chief of the Council 
 of Dacca was the head of the Company's affairs in 
 Eastern Bengal. Mr. Cartier himself had held 
 the post for about five years, and secured a for- 
 tune in it, before taking the higher flight which 
 ended in the governorship of Bengal. In 1771 the 
 Thackerays found the Chiefship filled by Mr. James 
 Harris, who, like Mr. Cartier, had passed his whole 
 inland service at Dacca and realized a fortune. 
 Coming to India as a Writer in 1 758, Mr. Harris 
 
 F
 
 82 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 was in 1 771 well enough off to contemplate retire- 
 ment. As Thackeray's superior oflScer he would 
 see much of the young ladies, and no doubt played 
 the part of host to the brother and sisters until 
 they installed themselves in a house of their own 
 at Dacca. He became attached to the charming 
 Henrietta, and shortly after the return of Major 
 and Mrs. Rennell to that station in the autumn of 
 1772, the marriage took place from Jane's new 
 wedded home. 
 
 Mr. Harris retired from the service, and sailed 
 with his bride on January 7, 1773, by the Prince 
 of Wales for England. The same ship carried the 
 generous friend of the family, Mr. Cartier, who 
 handed over the governorship of Bengal to Warren 
 Hastings in the previous April, but had re- 
 mained on for ten months in Calcutta to settle 
 his affairs. The ex- Governor was thus able to 
 ' marry one of the Thackeray sisters from his house, 
 and to form a pleasant Dacca party with the other 
 sister and her husband on their voyage home. 
 
 James Harris seems to have been a man of the 
 minor nabob type, common among retired Anglo- 
 Indians of his time. He bought a country seat
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 83 
 
 near Chelmsford and a town house in Great 
 Ormonde Street, then a fashionable locality ; drove 
 four-in-hand, and lived in a style which left 
 his fortune much diminished at his death. His 
 widow, Henrietta Thackeray, was somewhat 
 abruptly awakened to the fact on her sending 
 the executor a list of twenty-five friends to whom 
 she wished to present mourning rings. He 
 shrewdly remarked that she had better keep the 
 money for her children. Enough remained to 
 enable her to setde comfortably at Hadley, near 
 her brother William Makepeace after his retire- 
 ment from Bengal. Of her descendants two have 
 left an honourable record at Balliol College, several 
 distinguished themselves in the army or at the bar, 
 at least one went to India. 
 
 While Thackeray thus prosperously settled his 
 sisters in marriage he was also prospering himself. 
 His nominal salary, as fourth in the Dacca Council, 
 appears on the Company's pay-sheet for 1771 as 
 only Rs. 495, or say £62 per annum— about half his 
 allowances during previous years under Governor 
 Cartier in Calcutta. But whatever restrictions were 
 placed on the personal dealings of the Chief of the 
 F 2
 
 84 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Council, who drew a compensating grant, the 
 junior members had the privilege of private trade. 
 They could not have bought their daily food and 
 kept a roof over their heads without it. In making 
 the Annual Investment for the Company they made 
 investments for themselves. 
 
 The disorganized state of inland commerce 
 also led the Government to allow its servants to 
 contract for many of its local requirements. It did 
 so on the ground that they were often the only 
 trustworthy purveyors whom it could find to deal 
 with in the rural districts. They took contracts for 
 grain for the army, building materials for forts, 
 transport animals and boats for the conveyance of 
 troops and treasure. Almost every one of them 
 gave his name or protection to some native 
 merchant and received a share of the profits. 
 
 Under the old system, against which the Court 
 of Directors inveighed, the Company's servants 
 claimed exemption from the transit duties levied 
 on all other merchandise. This unfair privilege 
 was abolished by Lord Clive's reforms, and the 
 Company's servants had to conduct their private 
 dealings subject to well-understood restrictions. To
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 85 
 
 reconcile the practice permitted in India with the 
 letter of the instructions from home, it became 
 common for them to trade under the name of 
 a native partner. The Court of Directors, while 
 continuing to protest, knew that they could only 
 put a stop to such transactions by a general rise in 
 salaries from which they still shrank. There had 
 always been a wide space between orders issued on 
 this side of the globe and their execution on the 
 other. More than once that interval saved our 
 position in India, Charnock, as we saw, founded 
 Calcutta in the teeth of Leadenhall Street, 
 
 Thackeray soon had an opportunity of still 
 further increasing his fortune. The Dual Govern- 
 ment left behind by Clive had visibly broken down, 
 and in 1772 the Company resolved to stand forth as 
 the sole responsible Government in Bengal, Under 
 its orders Warren Hastings, the new Governor- 
 General, appointed a British ' Collector ' or Chief 
 for the administration of each circle or District. 
 Thackeray was selected as the first ' Collector ' of 
 the dangerous frontier province of Sylhet. In this 
 great outlying angle of North-eastern Bengal new 
 branches of commerce opened to him. Sylhet,
 
 86 777^ THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 with its virgin forests and mineral wealth, sup- 
 plied the materials for the new fortress and city of 
 Calcutta, several hundred miles off at the other 
 end of the great river highway. The Hon. Robert 
 Lindsay, a son of the Earl of Balcarres, who suc- 
 ceeded as Resident or ' Collector ' of Sylhet in 
 1778, four years after Thackeray left, grew quickly 
 rich as a wholesale lime merchant and ship builder. 
 'My pay as Resident,' wrote the candid Robert, 
 ' did not exceed ;{^500 per annum ^ so that fortune 
 could only be acquired by my own industry. 
 During the period of Thackeray's residence, from 
 1772 to 1774, there were not only similar contracts 
 open to him, but also the profitable business of 
 supplying elephants for the Company's troops. 
 
 These two men, William Makepeace Thackeray 
 and the Hon. Robert Lindsay, are the first British 
 administrators who left their mark in that remote 
 District. They converted what had been a wild 
 borderland into a British province, and ' Thackeray's 
 House ' was still pointed out when I visited Sylhet 
 a century later. Their rule was a simple one. 
 ' Black tax-farmers ' brought the i^ 17,000 of land- 
 tax to the treasury in the local currency of cowries
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 87 
 
 — 4i,cxx) of which equalled one pound sterling. 
 The British head of the District shipped off to 
 Dacca the heaped-up masses of little shells ; or kept 
 part of them in payment for the lime, timber, and 
 elephants which he supplied to the Company. 
 Such local products formed in fact a means of 
 remitting the revenue, alike profitable to the British 
 Resident and convenient to the central Government. 
 The Dacca Council asked few questions as long as 
 the fixed amount of cowries, or their equivalent 
 in the articles ordered for the Company, came 
 down the river. 
 
 The serious business of the Resident of Sylhet, 
 or ' Collector ' as he began to be called in 1772, was 
 to hold the District against the frontier tribes and 
 rebellious chiefs. Each autumn the hillmen burst 
 out upon the valley : if in any year they did not 
 come, it was because the floods had already swept 
 away the crops. Murderous affrays still took place 
 between the Hindu and Musalman cultivators. At 
 the greater festivals of the rival religions, temples 
 were sacked, cows were slain within the holy 
 precincts, mosques were defiled, and bloody re- 
 prisals followed on both sides. It must be remem-
 
 88 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 bered that when Thackeray went to Sylhet in 
 1772, it had only been under nominal British 
 control for six years. He found it as it was left 
 by centuries of native rule. 
 
 What that state was may be realized from a 
 single incident in the administration of his near 
 successor, the Hon. Robert Lindsay. On one 
 festival, wrote this gentleman, having ' certain 
 intelligence that the Muhammadans meditated ah 
 assault upon our Government,' and ' as the town was 
 on fire in different directions, with my small force 
 I marched to the place were the crowd was col- 
 lected,' He found them drawn up at the top of 
 a hill under command of a ' Priest,' and called on 
 them to disperse. Their leader ' immediately drew 
 his sword, and exclaiming with a loud voice, " This 
 is the day to kill or to die — the reign of the English 
 is at an end," aimed a heavy blow at my head. This 
 I was fortunate enough to parry. But he struck so 
 hard that my sword was broken, and litde more 
 than the hilt remained in my hand. My blatk 
 servant at the same moment thrust a pistol into my 
 hand, which I instantly fired and the Priest fell; 
 and so close were we in contact that his clothes
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 89 
 
 were set on fire. My sepoys in the rear, seeing my 
 dangerous position, discharged a platoon while 
 I stood In front, from which I miraculously escaped. 
 We then charged with bayonets and drove the 
 armed multitude over the hill.' 
 
 Lindsay reported the affair very simply to the 
 Governor-General, Warren Hastings, saying that 
 he did not expect any further strife, as those who 
 would have continued it ' are no more.' 
 
 Thackeray, the first British ' Collector ' of the 
 District, found it in a still wilder state. Two 
 of his sources of income were the destruction of 
 tigers and the capture of wild elephants. Half 
 a dozen years later, Lindsay continued to bag sixty 
 or seventy tigers yearly, for which the Government 
 allowed liberal rewards. Thackeray's name survives 
 as a mighty hunter of elephants. Herds of these 
 animals roamed through the mountains and forests, 
 at times forcing the hillmen to lodge in trees for 
 shelter, and sallying forth to devastate the villages 
 and crop-lands of the plains. ' On visiting the 
 country where the greater part of my elephants were 
 caught,' wrote Lindsay, ' I fell in with a small tribe 
 of hill people, living more in the style of the brute
 
 90 THE THACKERAY S IN INDIA 
 
 creation than any I had ever met with. They are 
 well known by the name of Kukis, and have their 
 habitations on spreading- trees to defend them from 
 beasts of prey. They live on wild honey and the 
 fruits of the forest.' 
 
 If the supply of elephants for the Company's 
 troops yielded a good profit, it was apt to bring the 
 purveyor into unpleasant disputes. For the newly 
 caught elephant is a delicate monster, apt to die 
 on his travels, and with as infinite a capacity for 
 unsoundness as a young horse. The diflSculty 
 of judging an elephant forms, indeed, the subject of 
 many shrewd stories among the Bengal peasantry. 
 One relates how a merchant who believed he had 
 a really sound elephant, and was just about to 
 complete its sale, espied a villager looking' fixedly 
 at the animal's hind legs. Fearing that the man 
 detected some unknown flaw, he whispered, ' Say 
 nothing till the bargain is struck, and I shall 
 give you fifty rupees.' The villager stood silent 
 and stolid as before, and presendy the merchant 
 handed him the money. 'But now tell me, what 
 was it you discovered ? ' asked the merchant. 
 ' Discovered ? what could I discover } ' replied the
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 91 
 
 peasant, tying up the silver in his waistband. * I 
 had never seen an elephant before, and I was 
 watching how far his tail could reach in flapping 
 off the flies,' 
 
 In 1 774 a batch of elephants, for which Thackeray 
 was the real although not the ostensible contractor, 
 turned out badly. Only sixteen out of sixty-six 
 survived their trying march across India to Belgram 
 — a distance of about a thousand miles. The price 
 of the animals averaged Rs. 1000 each, and the 
 Government, having given an advance of Rs. 33,000, 
 disputed the balance and called on Thackeray to 
 divulge his connexion with the nominal contractors. 
 He refused, on the ground that if he were to do so, 
 * he might, by breaking his promise, forfeit the 
 character of a man of principle and honour, and 
 suffer in the opinion of his friends.' He preferred 
 to bring the matter before a judicial tribunal, boldly 
 sued the Company in the Supreme Court of Bengal, 
 and obtained a decree for Rs. 29,600 (say ;^3,7oo) 
 and costs. 
 
 The Court of Directors in England resented the 
 loss. A couple of years after Thackeray had left 
 India, they made it the subject of one of the carping
 
 92 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 despatches with which they rewarded the hard and 
 faithful service of their Governor- General, Warren 
 Hastings. The Bengal Government, it appears, had 
 gone carefully into the matter, but did not find 
 it possible to resist Thackeray's claim in court. 
 Francis and his partisans, as usual, turned the 
 action of the Governor into material for a malignant 
 charge. But there can be litde doubt that the 
 pure-handed Hastings did his best in this as in 
 other cases to see justice done. He himself, at an 
 earlier period, held a contract for the supply of 
 commissariat bullocks. Hastings had thus a per- 
 sonal knowledge of the very class of transactions 
 in which Thackeray was engaged, and he knew 
 perfectly what was permissible and what was not 
 under the system of anonymous trade then practised 
 in Bengal. His whole career, and especially his 
 strict control as Governor-General, make it certain 
 that if, in the interests of the Company, he could 
 have defended the suit he would have done so. 
 
 The Hon. Robert Lindsay, indeed, did a much 
 finer stroke of business in Sylhet. He found, four 
 years after Thackeray's departure, the revenues 
 still collected in cowries. A fleet of armed boats
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 93 
 
 was maintained to convey this cumbrous currency 
 of 700 millions of the little shells each year to Dacca, 
 at ' a loss of no less than ten per cent., exclusive of 
 depredations on the passage down,' The Honour- 
 able Robert conceived the idea of remitting the 
 value of the cowries in limestone, for which he held 
 the contract, and keeping the revenues of Sylhet in 
 payment. It was only the unfortunate limit to the 
 demand for mortar in Calcutta that prevented 
 the whole land tax of the District from passing into 
 his pockets. He also created a ship-building trade 
 from the timber of the Sylhet forests, after some 
 Crusoe experiences of being unable to get his 
 craft down the river owing to their large size. 
 
 ' I understand, my dear Robert,' wrote his mother 
 the Countess of Balcarres, ' that you are a great 
 ship -builder, and your talents in this line I do not 
 dispute. But I have one favour to ask of you, 
 which is that you will not come home in one of 
 your own building ! ' 'I implicitly followed her 
 advice,' adds the sagacious Robert. 
 
 During Thackeray's two years in Sylhet, he 
 continued the native system of administration, but 
 gradually imposed on it the methods of British
 
 94 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 rule. Under the Mughals an agent of the Delhi 
 treasury, always distrusted and constantly changed, 
 had remitted the revenue to Dacca, and made 
 as much as he could by extortion during his 
 precarious tenure of office. Village tax-farmers 
 brought to the Emperor's intendant the quota 
 payable by the separate rural communes, as 
 shown in the books of the village accountant and 
 the Imperial registrar. Each of these subordinates 
 took in his turn an allowance, and increased it 
 as much as he dared by bribes. The native 
 Government recognized no landowners or inter- 
 mediate proprietary rights between the Imperial 
 fisc and the actual tillers of the soil. The rural 
 community in Sylhet consisted of two classes, the 
 officials and the cultivators. 
 
 In the early years of British rule the system 
 began to be humanised by appointing the revenue- 
 farmers from the chief occupiers of land. A class 
 of quasi -proprietors thus grew up, with a stable 
 interest in the good management of the District, 
 representing the treasury demand on the one side 
 and the actual capabilities of the rural communes 
 on the other. In 1793 this class was sufficiently
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 95 
 
 important to supply the basis of the Permanent 
 Settlement- of Sylhet. Under Thackeray and his 
 immediate successors a number of oppressive im- 
 posts were abolished. The armed fleet against 
 the river-pirates, for which a single division of the 
 District had been mulcted in a tribute of forty-eight 
 armed boats by the Mughal Governor, became 
 a thing of the past. The District produced more 
 revenue with less pressure upon the people. 
 Deductions were frequently made for bad seasons 
 and raids by the hillmen. But cultivation steadily 
 extended, and the same area which sent ;^ 16,704 to 
 the Mughal emperor in 1765, yielded £2'j,2,72 
 to the British Government in 1 792. The land-tax 
 continued to be paid in the shell-currency of 
 cowries until 1820. 
 
 In 1774 Thackeray was promoted to be third in 
 Council at Dacca, and rejoined his sister Jane and 
 Major Rennell at that station. During this summer 
 the three had to mourn for a little Jane, born to the 
 Rennells in July, 1 773. In time another little Jane 
 took her place, and more children followed, but the 
 parents never forgot that solitary grave in Eastern 
 Bengal. A silver model of her tomb, made for the
 
 96 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 sorrowing mother, still remains an heirloom in the 
 family. 
 
 This loss of their first-born, the common tribute 
 paid by our predecessors in India for British rule, 
 combined with Rennell's ill-health from wounds 
 and fever to make them cast long-ing- eyes home- 
 ward. There were no bracing Himalayan stations 
 in those days. The Rennells got their only change 
 of air by voyaging up and down the rivers in 
 thatched country boats. Their sole sanitarium was 
 the Chittagong coast-strip, backed by its low range 
 of hills ; now considered a malarious tract, then 
 the one poor health-resort for our countrymen in 
 North-eastern India. Writing thence in 1776, 
 Rennell described it as the Montpelier of Bengal. 
 That simple-minded philosopher found every place 
 pleasant if his wife could only be with him. 
 ' How supremely happy I am,' he says of Jane 
 Thackeray, ' in possessing such a woman ! Temper 
 is, I believe, the basis of love and friendship. 
 Neither the wittiest nor the wisest bear away the 
 palm of happiness.' 
 
 Thackeray doubtless accompanied his sister and 
 brother-in-law on these river journeys. The barge
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 97 
 
 of the Third in Council would make a fine show 
 among the little flotilla of roofed country pinnaces, 
 with their green Venetian windows and cooking- 
 boats astern. But he, too, having accumulated a 
 fortune, turned his thoughts towards home. In 
 1775 he paid a visit to Calcutta, and fell in 
 love with a talented and beautiful girl. She was 
 one of three sisters who, within a few years, 
 married three Bengal civilians of note. Their 
 father, Lieut. -Colonel Richmond Webb, born about 
 1 715, and a cornet in the Queen's Own Royal 
 Dragoons in 1735, became captain in Moreton's 
 regiment in 1741, and commanded a company for 
 King George at Culloden. He retired from the 
 army as Lieutenant- Colonel in 1 758, and was buried 
 in the east cloister of Westminster Abbey in 1 785. 
 
 This gallant officer sprang from a line of soldiers. 
 The family originally bore the name of Richmond, 
 and claimed descent from the De Richmonds, 
 Constables of Richmond and Lords of Burton. 
 Under their more modern surname of Richmond 
 Webb, assumed upon marriage with the heiress of 
 Draycot, Wilts, in the fifteenth century, they had 
 during three hundred years g^ven good men to the 
 
 G
 
 93 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 army and the State. Perhaps the most famous ot 
 them was General John Richmond Webb, the victor 
 of Weynendal 1 708, wounded at Malplaquet 1 709, 
 and a divisional commander in Marlborough's cam- 
 paigns. One of his kinsmen, a captain in the 
 Guards, died in 1734; leaving his property to an 
 only son, Lieut. -Colonel Richmond Webb, whose 
 daughter Amelia became engaged to Thackeray 
 in 1775. 
 
 In that year Amelia Richmond Webb was a girl 
 of seventeen, with a bright intelligence which set 
 off Thackeray's more solid qualities and exercised 
 an important influence on his after-life. The 
 vestry book of St. John's Cathedral, Calcutta, 
 records their marriage on January 31, 1776, and 
 the young couple soon sailed for England. 
 Thackeray had realized a competence by nine 
 and a half years' work, and he preferred to retire 
 in the first vigour of manhood rather than to pile 
 up a fortune at the cost of broken health and 
 domestic bereavement, such as overclouded his 
 sister Rennell's home at Dacca. 
 
 Judging from the pay-sheets of Leadenhall 
 Street, the Company got his services very cheap.
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 99 
 
 I have added together the annual salaries and 
 allowances drawn by William Makepeace Thack- 
 eray throughout his ten years of Indian residence, 
 as shown in the returns of the Bengal Government 
 to the Court of Directors. The total for his entire 
 service makes only Rs. 16,230, or less than a single 
 year's pay of a Bengal Collector of the lowest 
 gjade in the present century. 
 
 Even allowing for the higher value of the 
 rupee, the sum would represent to Thackeray 
 about ;^2,ooo, and might perhaps have sufficed 
 for his necessary expenses during twelve months 
 as a member of the Dacca Council. Such accounts, 
 I have said, while they gave an appearance of 
 marvellous economy to the Company's system 
 of working, failed to show the incomes of their 
 servants. I doubt if they disclose even their official 
 pay. In ten years Thackeray saved enough to 
 render him comfortable for the rest of his days. 
 His fortune, like the larger ones carried home by 
 many of his contemporaries, was acquired by private 
 trade. 
 
 He and his bride were still very young and had 
 long lives before them. She was but eighteen, 
 G 2
 
 lOO THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 he twenty-six, on their return to England in 1776. 
 They found both her parents living-; and the 
 Richmond Webb family, with its ancient history, 
 distinguished war-services, and the veteran of Cul- 
 loden at its head, became an attractive feature in 
 their home-life. We shall see the fascination which 
 that lineage had for their grandson the novelist. 
 They called their second son (his father) Richmond, 
 and their next son Webb, names which took root 
 among their descendants, and commemorate to 
 this day their connexion with the feudal Constables 
 of Richmond and the heiress of Draycot four 
 centuries ago. Mrs. Thackeray's father. Colonel 
 Richmond Webb, had only one son who grew 
 to manhood, and he died as a young soldier, 
 unmarried, in the American War, Of Colonel 
 Richmond Webb's four daughters, the youngest 
 did not marry. The other three, as already men- 
 tioned, became the wives of Bengal civilians. 
 
 One of these gentlemen, Mr. Peter Moore, a man 
 of energy and talent, was destined to play an 
 important part in the Thackeray family. As his 
 brother-in-law the elephant- hunting Thackeray 
 may be taken as the type of a Bengal District
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL loi 
 
 Officer in the last century, so Moore represents 
 the more brilliant career which the secretariat 
 at the Capital held out to the abler or more 
 fortunate members of that great service. Peter 
 Moore reached Bengal at the age of sixteen, in 
 1769, three years after Thackeray, and the two 
 youths were Writers together during a couple of 
 years in Calcutta. In 1770 Moore was attached 
 to the head-quarters of the Revenue Department 
 as assistant under the Collector-General. Gaining 
 a step in the following year, he was promoted in 
 1773 to the central office of control and appeal, 
 which then began to gather into its hands the 
 threads of the rural administration. 
 
 In this position, as assistant to the Superin- 
 tendent of Khalsa, Calcutta, he mastered the new 
 revenue system which Hastings was introducing 
 into Bengal. That Governor- General had em- 
 barked on an investigation of the resources of 
 Bengal, so as to put an end to excessive demands 
 on the one side and to evasions or connivances 
 on the other. He carried out his difficult task by 
 a Committee of Revenue with himself at its head. 
 In 1774 he appointed Peter Moore to be the
 
 I02 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 secretary, and in 1776 to be a member of the 
 Committee. In 1782 Moore reached the grade of 
 ' Senior Merchant and Collector of the Assessment 
 under the Rule of Ordnance,' to the shaping of 
 which he had himself largely contributed. He 
 apparently retired in 1783, with a fortune gained 
 by fourteen years' service. 
 
 In 1774, when only twenty-one, he had married 
 Sarah, eldest daughter of Colonel Richmond Webb, 
 whose sister Amelia became the wife of Thackeray 
 two years later. On returning to England Moore 
 settled at Hadley, Middlesex — the 'faire plain for 
 two armies to joyne together ' made memorable by 
 the battle of Barnet. There too the Thackerays 
 bought a small property in January, 1 786 ; perhaps 
 with the help of Mrs. Thackeray's inheritance from 
 her father, Colonel Richmond Webb buried in 
 Westminster Abbey cloisters in June, 1785. The 
 two married sisters, Sarah and Amelia, were thus 
 reunited by the nearest ties of neighbourhood for 
 the rest of their lives. Four years later, in 1790, 
 Thackeray's own sister Henrietta also joined the 
 little Bengal settlement at Hadley Green, after the 
 death of her husband, James Harris. Thither, too,
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 103 
 
 came often his other sister, Mrs. Rennell, and her 
 now famous Major, who, on their retirement from 
 India in 1777, had established themselves in the 
 learned world of London, an hour and a half's 
 drive from Hadley Green. 
 
 There is something- very solid and English about 
 this family party of sisters and brothers-in-law 
 who, after a successful youth in India, settled down 
 in early middle age to so close and affectionate 
 an intercourse. Rennell brought to it the honours 
 of a leading man of science, Moore formed a link 
 between it and English public life, the Richmond 
 Webb connexion added something of the gloss of 
 fashion. Colopel Richmond Webb had given to 
 his children a tone of chivalry and high yet prac- 
 tical aims which we are not wont to associate with 
 the Georgian era. ' Be honest and good,' he wrote 
 to his son while at Eton, the son whose career 
 was destined to be cut short in the American 
 War. ' You have a good stock of learning which 
 I hope you won't neglect. Make yourself master 
 of your fence and your sword, and you will be 
 enabled to serve your King, Country, yourself and 
 friends: and there's nothing that you, who are
 
 I04 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 born a gentleman and educated like one, may not 
 aspire to.' 
 
 The Thackeray household was perhaps the least 
 distinguished of the Hadley group. While Rennell 
 constantly scaled new heights in science, and Moore 
 was making his mark in the Parliamentary and 
 financial world, William Makepeace Thackeray led 
 a simple but hospitable country life. A great 
 digger in his garden, if nieces bantered him on his 
 somewhat rural clothes, he replied, ' My dears, as 
 I do not like the trouble of choosing, I tell my 
 tailor to send me at one time this coloured suit, 
 and at another a blue with brass buttons, so that 
 when I write for a new one he looks in his order- 
 book and sees which turn it is.' His portrait 
 represents a generous, good-humoured face, with 
 kind eyes, well -cut features, and a fresh colour. 
 Thackeray's home was in keeping with its owner 
 — ' a quiet mead,' writes the family chronicler, ' with 
 here and there fresh pools of water shining beneath 
 clusters of fair lime trees.' Active in local good 
 works and a steady churchwarden, the newspaper 
 obituary of his twenty-seven years at Hadley Green 
 dwells chiefly on the benevolence, integrity, and
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 105 
 
 genial humanity which had made him the friend 
 of all around. 
 
 Children soon began to fill the house, until in 
 1797 the tale of twelve was complete. Of the 
 fortunes of some of them, the next chapter will 
 speak. His wife's influence was the dominant one, 
 and it imparted to the strong Thackeray character, 
 racy of the Yorkshire moors, a finer blend from 
 the Richmond -Webb descent. 'Those boys of 
 William will be clever,' said his brother, himself 
 an able man ; ' they have such a clever mother.' 
 She seems indeed to have been a bright, charming 
 woman, with a certain graceful indolence and love 
 of ease which sisters-in-law did not fail to mark, 
 but benevolently ascribed to her having been in 
 India. Amelia Thackeray died in 18 10, aged fifty- 
 three ; and William Makepeace Thackeray, her 
 husband, in 1813, in his sixty -fourth year. 
 
 The conspicuous member of the Hadley settle- 
 ment was their brother-in-law, Peter Moore. The 
 Gentleman's Magazine tells us that Moore ' made 
 an ample fortune in India,' and as Lord of the 
 Manor of Hadley, quartering the arms of the great 
 Sir Thomas More, he took his place among the
 
 Io6 ' THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 magnates of the neighbourhood. Barely thirty 
 when he retired, he threw himself into English 
 politics with the unabated energy which won his 
 way in Bengal. He had owed his appointment in 
 the Company's service to Lord Holland, and on 
 his return home he became closely associated with 
 the Whig leaders, acting for a time as a sort of 
 unofficial whip. This connexion ranged him on 
 the Burke and Sheridan side of the battle waged 
 over Warren Hastings. In 1 796 he was returned 
 to Parliament along with Sir Philip Francis by the 
 householders of Tewkesbury, but both were un- 
 seated on the ground that the franchise vested in 
 the freemen and freeholders alone. Elected for 
 Coventry in 1803, after a contest which cost him 
 ^25,000, Moore sat for that constituency through 
 six Parliaments. In 1806 he had a son returned 
 for Queenborough. 
 
 Politics, however, formed but one outlet for 
 Moore's many-sided activity, and it would have 
 been well for him if they had been the only one. 
 He soon became prominent in the public ventures 
 of the day. As chairman of the managing com- 
 mittee he took a leading part with Sheridan in the
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 107 
 
 re-building of Drury Lane Theatre, and his town 
 house formed a refuge at need for that spendthrift 
 of talent. It was from Moore's residence in Great 
 George Street that Sheridan's body was borne to 
 Westminster Abbey, and it was he who placed the 
 memorial above Sheridan's grave. The Manor 
 House of Hadley became a centre for Whig poli- 
 ticians, and must have sorely tri|d the patience of 
 its Tory neighbours. Moore fignured as the chief 
 projector of the Highgate Tunnel, the Imperial 
 Gaslight Company, and in other speculations which 
 the accumulation of capital after the long war set 
 on foot. With a fine contempt for the cost of 
 victory, he fought the famous battle of the Coal-gas 
 against the Oil-gas Company, in which the latter 
 dropped iJ"30,ooo and his side ' only i^ 15,000 ! ' 
 
 After representing Coventry for twenty-one 
 years he lost his seat in 1824, as the silk-weavers 
 suspected him of having favoured their masters' 
 cause in a trade dispute. 'The Corporation or 
 the Tory party took care to increase this sus- 
 picion,' says the Gentleman's Magazine^ ' and by 
 plying the electors with beer and gin carried the 
 election.' Worse misfortunes awaited him. He had
 
 Io8 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 become conspicuous as ' one of the most adroit and 
 successful men ever known ' in g-etting- a Com- 
 pany's bill through the House, and as a Company- 
 promoter in the inflation of 1824-5. When the 
 collapse came, he gave up all his property beyond 
 a bare subsistence. But although he had personally 
 the reputation of honesty, he was ' made the scape- 
 goat for a multitude of jobbers,' to again quote the 
 Gentleman's. Magazine. Compelled to fly to 
 the Continent, as in England ' there was no hope 
 of his last days being spent outside a prison,' he 
 tried to write his memoirs at Dieppe^ and died 
 a broken exile at Abbeville on May 5, 1828, aged 
 seventy-five. 
 
 Sir William Congreve, the inventor of the rocket 
 which bears his name, was another scapegoat of 
 the same crisis, and died in the same month 
 a fugitive at Toulouse. Moore's ruined old age 
 probably supplied some touches to the story of 
 Colonel Newcome. 
 
 For perhaps the best service which he rendered 
 to his country was his guardianship of his grand- 
 nephew, the future novelist. Thackeray's father 
 died, as we have seen, at Calcutta in 18 15; his
 
 THACKERAY'S GRANDFATHER IN BENGAL 109 
 
 mother married again ; and when the little boy of 
 six returned to England in 181 7, his grandfather 
 the elephant-hunter, and his grandmother, had been 
 dead for some years. His grand-uncle Moore 
 became his guardian, and the visits to the Manor 
 House at Hadley formed some of the happiest 
 recollections of Thackeray's childhood. The boy 
 lived for a time, says a rather florid biographer 
 who confounds the grand-uncle with the grand- 
 father, ' amid the scent of his grandfather's clover, 
 while he luxuriated in the indulgence which the 
 old man lavished.' 
 
 Mr. Moore, his grand-uncle and guardian, was 
 in fact the great man of Hadley throughout 
 Thackeray's boyhood, overshadowing- the other 
 members of the family by his wealth, energy, and 
 f)Osition in Parliament and in the financial world. 
 Amid all his own speculations and calamities he 
 guarded the little fortune left to the orphan. 
 Thackeray on coming of age in 1832 found himself, 
 we are told, in possession of ;^2o,ooo. 
 
 But Moore's influence acted on the great novelist 
 in a more permanent way. At the very age when 
 the impressions of the boy harden and set into
 
 no THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 the memories of the man, Thackeray saw his 
 guardian suddenly cast forth from the world of 
 wealth and Parliament, and die an exiled bankrupt. 
 The catastrophe formed his earliest awakening to 
 the Vanttas Vanitatum. which became the text of 
 so much of his teaching- : his first acquaintance with 
 ' the old, old tale Of folly, fortune, glory, ruin.'
 
 [ "I ] 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN INDIA 
 
 Of the twelve children born to Sylhet Thackeray 
 and his wife eleven grew up, and nine found their 
 way to the East. They at once became a great 
 Indian family. The City influence of brother-in- 
 law Moore doubtless helped to keep open the 
 floodgates of patronage which so abundantly flowed 
 from Leadenhall Street to the crowded household 
 at Hadley Green. But that patronage was chiefly 
 due to Sir Hugh Inglis, a ' private adventurer ' or 
 trader at Dacca during Cartier's residence there, 
 1 754- 1 766. On Cartier's promotion to the Presi- 
 dency town, ending with the Governorship of 
 Bengal, Mr. Inglis followed him, and g^ew into 
 one of the merchant princes of Calcutta. He thus 
 came into close contact with Cartier's young friends, 
 the Thackerays. Indeed the sagacious and kindly
 
 112 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Scotchman was one of ' the sensible men in India 
 who were to find out Jane,' as her mother predicted. 
 Retiring with a fortune in 1775, he was three times 
 Chairman of the Court of Directors between 1 797 
 and 1 81 2, and received a baronetcy. Sir Hugh 
 Inglis never lost sight of the old Dacca group, 
 and as a lifelong friend of Jane Thackeray after her 
 marriage to Rennell, he secured nominations for 
 many of her nephews to the Company's service. 
 
 Of the seven sons of William Makepeace Thack- 
 eray three received appointments in the Company's 
 Civil Service at Madras, a fourth in its Bengal 
 Civil Service, and a fifth in its Bengal army. A 
 sixth went to Calcutta as a barrister. Of four 
 daughters who reached womanhood, two married 
 Bengal civilians, the husband of a third was 
 Attorney- General in Ceylon, the fourth became 
 the mother of a distinguished member of the 
 Viceroy's Council in India. 
 
 The only son of the Sylhet elephant- hunter w^ho 
 did not go to the East was Francis, in holy orders. 
 A man of learning and of sufficient means, he early 
 retired to a Hertfordshire parish and spent his 
 life among his books. Famous in the family for
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN INDIA 1 13 
 
 his fairy tales, he gained an honourable place in 
 the world of letters by his ' History of the Earl 
 of Chatham ' and his ' State of Ancient Britain 
 under the Roman Emperors.' Carlyle repeatedly 
 quotes Francis Thackeray's ' Lord Chatham ' in his 
 Frederick the Great. Lord Macaulay reviewed 
 the work. M. Brunei includes it in his Manuel 
 du Libraire among les ouvrages les plus estimes 
 en tout genre. 
 
 If the fine Richmond-Webb strain showed itself 
 in the fairy tales of Francis Thackeray, it took an 
 erratic form in the youngest son Charles. Born 
 in 1794, the child of his parents' mature middle 
 life, Charles seems to have been the most brilliant 
 of the brothers. Having been called to the bar 
 he went to India to practise, but without the neces- 
 sary licence. He returned to England to obtain 
 one, a.nd makes his appearance in a 'Directory of 
 1832 as one of the fourteen gentlemen who then 
 constituted the Calcutta bar. Few legal loaves 
 and fishes fell to Charles Thackeray's share. 
 The Family Book speaks of him as ' full of wit 
 and talent, handsome and agreeable — a victim to 
 the demon of drink then so fashionable in India.' 
 
 H
 
 114 ^^^ THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 An old Calcutta resident more vaguely described 
 him as clever, fond of the bottle, and with little 
 practice in his profession. 
 
 He found a congenial refuge on the Press, then 
 bursting its official bonds, and asserting itself as a 
 new power in India. When the versatile Stocqueler 
 bought the JbAn Bull and turned it into the 
 Engh'skman, three barristers — John Peter Grant 
 of an ancient Scottish family, John Farley Leith, 
 and Charles Thackeray — were the leader-writers. 
 The first two became famous names in Bengal: 
 Charles Thackeray sank, about 1846, into an 
 obscure grave. During the eight epoch-making 
 years of the Afghan and Sikh wars which preceded 
 his death, the Englishman was the voice of our 
 countrymen in Bengal. Its leading articles not 
 only recorded, but helped to create, history. The 
 Indian sun makes no allowance for the frailties of 
 genius. Charles Thackeray drifted into a waif. 
 Yet some of the brightest articles in the news- 
 paper which to this day leads British independent 
 opinion in Bengal came from his pen. Lord 
 Macaulay's last Essay, before sailing for India, was 
 his review of Francis Thackeray's ' Earl of Chatham '
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN INDIA II5 
 
 (January, 1834). During Charles Thackeray's 
 years of Calcutta journalism, Macaulay set up at 
 the Englishman press the rough proofs of yet more 
 memorable Essays for the Edinburgh Review. 
 
 If official fortunes could still be made in India, 
 they were on a small scale compared with the 
 gains of private trade brought home by the pre- 
 ceding generation. The Company had long 
 perceived the false economy of stinting their 
 servants' pay, and allowing them to grow rich 
 by traffic on their own account. But it was not 
 till near the end of the last century that it nerved 
 itself to apply the only real remedy — a fair day's 
 wage for a fair day's work. During the years 
 which intervened between Sylhet Thackeray's 
 departure from India and the arrival of his sons 
 in that country, the reform was carried out. 
 Liberal salaries took the place of unrecognized 
 profits, and an Indian civilian could only accumulate 
 money by saving it from his monthly pay. For 
 such modest fortunes heavy risks had still to be run. 
 Of the six sons of Sylhet Thackeray who went to 
 India, five died there, and the sixth on a voyage to 
 the Cape for the recovery of his health. 
 H 2
 
 Il6 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 The eldest of them, William Thackeray, born 
 1778, arrived at Madras as a Writer on January 3, 
 1796, a few months before he reached eighteen. 
 After a year in the Secretariat he was sent as 
 assistant to the Commercial Resident at Vizaga- 
 patam. There he set himself to learn the local 
 dialect, and was the first Madras civilian who earned 
 a reward under the rules of 1797 for encouraging 
 the study of oriental languages. The examiners 
 testified to his ' thorough and masterly knowledge of 
 the Telugu,' for which the Government presented 
 him, in 1800, with the sum of Rs. 3,500, then equal 
 to about ;^4oo. He immediately received a good 
 appointment, and an official minute assured him 
 ' that should his attention to the duties of his new 
 office be found equal to his diligence in the study 
 of the language, the Governor in Council would 
 have the same pleasure in promoting him in the 
 Revenue Department which he then felt in bestow- 
 ing the above public mark of approbation.' 
 
 Rapid advancement followed. Lord Clive, the 
 Governor of Madras, appointed the young civilian 
 of four years' standing to be Translator to the 
 Government, and in November, 1 800, selected him
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS II7 
 
 for a post of honour as an assistant to Sir Thomas 
 Munro in the settlement of the territories just ceded 
 to the Company by the Nizam. Thackeray's con- 
 nexion with Munro gave him his chance in life. 
 He won the regard of that great soldier-statesman, 
 and under his training became himself one of the 
 foremost administrators of his time. 
 
 In 1800 the Ceded Territories were handed over 
 to us by the Nizam in a wild state : a state of con- 
 stant battle between the peasantry and the petty 
 military chiefs who squeezed them. Many of 
 these local tyrants had been ' freebooters or leaders 
 of banditti,' whom the distant Nizam bribed into 
 his service by assigning to them the collection of 
 the land-tax. Others had simply seized on patches 
 of territory. A third section consisted of revenue 
 agents who had thrown off their allegiance to 
 the Nizam and stood out in revolt. A fourth 
 and more merciful class claimed descent from 
 the ancient Hindu Rajas of the country before the 
 Nizam usurped it. Although in some cases their 
 income did not exceed ;^50 a year, every chief 
 kept up a mob of courtiers and military retainers 
 who lived off the tillers of the soil.
 
 Il8 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Each of them, writes Sir Thomas Munro, ' became 
 the leader of a little army, and carried on destruc- 
 tive feuds with the villagers immediately contiguous 
 to him. Bands of robbers wandered through the 
 country, plundering and murdering such travellers 
 as refused to submit to their exactions. ... It is 
 computed that in the year 1800, when the Ceded 
 Districts were transferred to the Company's rule, 
 there were scattered through them, exclusive of 
 the Nizam's troops, about 30,000 armed peons, the 
 whole of whom, under the command of eighty 
 poligars [or chieftains], subsisted by rapine, and 
 committed everywhere the greatest excesses.' 
 
 The task assigned to Munro and his assistants 
 was to bring order out of this chaos, and to 
 substitute a fair revenue system for extortion by 
 the sword. They spent their days in the saddle, 
 and their nights in tents, ruined forts and Hindu 
 temples, or under the shadow of some crumbling 
 town-gate. One by one each hamlet was visited, 
 and the people were assured that the British 
 Government only asked for a moderate rental, 
 and, in return, would protect them in the undis- 
 turbed possession of their homesteads and fields.
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS II9 
 
 At first the news seemed too good to be true. In 
 the old times when the villagers fled from their 
 oppressors, the chieftain lured them back by similar 
 promises, and even gave them an agreement in 
 writing. ' But as soon as the crops were ready to be 
 cut,' says the official record, ' he would seize the pro- 
 duce, breaking through his word without scruple.' 
 
 If the change seemed at first incredible to the 
 peasants, the oppressors quickly perceived that 
 to them it meant ruin. Their swarms of 30,000 
 armed retainers made the task of settling the 
 country a dangerous one. The territory ceded 
 to us in 1800 was a vast cauldron, a thousand 
 miles in circuit, seething with armed violence and 
 resistance. ' The ten years of Mughal govern- 
 ment,' wrote Munro in February, 1801, soon after 
 Thackeray joined him, 'have been almost as destruc- 
 tive as so many years of war, and this last year 
 a mutinous unpaid army was turned loose during 
 the sowing season to collect their pay from the 
 villages. They drove off and sold the cattle, 
 extorted money by torture from every man who 
 fell into their hands, and plundered the houses and 
 shops of those who fled.'
 
 120 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 While assuring the peasantry of protection under 
 British rule, Munro at the same time disarmed the 
 chiefs. Their standing armies of freebooters were 
 broken up, and those of the leaders who refused 
 to settle down into quiet country-gentlemen were/ 
 pensioned off or expelled. Munro had a sufl&cient 
 force at his disposal, but like a true soldier he dis- 
 dained military display in civil life. He and his 
 assistants went about the country without escorts, 
 rightly holding that a District OflScer in India should 
 depend on his own influence and the authority of 
 his position for his personal safety, and that by the 
 absence of guards ' we get much sooner acquainted 
 with the people.' 
 
 This practice nearly cost William Thackeray's 
 life. Hearing of a murderous affray in a fortified 
 village near his camp, he hastened to the gate, was 
 refused admittance, and tried to climb over the 
 wall. His cool judgement saved him at the last 
 moment, but Sir Thomas Munro was called on 
 to explain how he allowed his assistant to be 
 exposed without an escort to such dangers. 
 Munro defended his refusal of escorts from the 
 regular troops, and explained that Thackeray had
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS 121 
 
 a hundred armed police for keeping order in the 
 territories assigned to his care. ' I shall give him 
 three hundred more,' adds Munro with quiet 
 humour, ' and he can select an escort from them, 
 who will be sufficient for his protection if he does 
 not try to scale forts ! ' 
 
 Three years under Munro laid the foundation 
 of a friendship between the two men that lasted 
 for life. Munro was seventeen years older than 
 W. Thackeray, but they had a common ground 
 in the scholarly pursuits which both loved. The 
 soldier-statesman complained that his annual circuit 
 of near a thousand miles, with its new set of urgent 
 questions demanding settlement at each morning 
 and evening camp, left him few moments for such 
 studies. ' The hours I spend on horseback,' he 
 wrote, ' are almost the only time I can call my 
 own.' His halts at Thackeray's headquarters 
 formed episodes in his tours to which he looked 
 back in after years. Through many a glorious 
 night the two men may have discoursed at the 
 door of their tent, marching with Xenophon's Ten 
 Thousand, or fighting over again, under the southern 
 constellations, the Peloponnesian War.
 
 122 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Munro, from the time that he taught himself 
 Spanish as a boy in order to read Don Quixote^ 
 and distinguished himself in the Glasgow Uni- 
 versity, had never lost his love of learning. 
 William Thackeray was a good classic, and on 
 his promotion to an independent charge, Munro 
 wrote to him lamenting that an end had to come 
 to their scholarly causeries in the jungle, and 
 giving his young friend some characteristic advice. 
 
 ' I regret your loss on my own account, for I used 
 to enjoy a fortnight's halt at Adoni, and talking 
 with you of Greeks and Trojans, after having seen 
 nobody for perhaps three or four months before, 
 but Bedars and gymnosophists, I hope that you 
 will in your new government carry into practice 
 the maxims of the Grecian worthies whom you so 
 much admire ; and that you will act in all situa- 
 tions as Aristides would have done ; and when 
 you feel your English spirits prompt you to 
 act first and think afterwards, that you will 
 recollect the temper of Themistocles — " Strike, but 
 hear." You are not likely to be placed in exactly 
 the same situation. But many others may occur, 
 in the course of your CoUectorate life, that will
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS I23 
 
 require as great a command of temper ; and if 
 there is any faith in physiognomy, I have no 
 doubt that you will rival the Grecians. For, after 
 you were cropt by the Adoni barber, you were 
 a striking likeness of a head of Themistocles 
 I recollect to have seen in an old edition of 
 Plutarch's Lives, printed in the time of Queen 
 Elizabeth.' 
 
 Since reference is thus made to William Thacke- 
 ray's appearance, I may mention that he stood 
 over six feet in height, and was famous for his 
 horses and horsemanship. A portrait of him at 
 this time, about the age of twenty-five, discloses 
 a refined face with serious, soft, brown eyes under 
 dark eyebrows. His wavy hair, long behind but 
 cut straight across the forehead, suggests the 
 Grecian likeness to which Munro refers. 
 
 Daily work among the chieftains and peasantry, 
 who formed his sole companions except when 
 Munro or some rare English officer rode into his 
 camp, soon made Thackeray a master of his 
 business. Within three years he thoroughly 
 acquired Sir Thomas Munro 's method of settling 
 a newly ceded country. In 1803 he was called
 
 124 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 to apply it on his own account in an extensive 
 southern chiefship including Tinnevelli to which 
 he was appointed Collector, Soon afterwards he 
 was promoted to be the first judge of the Court 
 established at Masulipatam. 
 
 Another three years in that position enabled him 
 to add a practical knowledge of judicial work to 
 his training as a settlement officer. In 1806, Lord 
 William Bentinck, the next Governor of Madras, 
 determined to utilise for a difficult and delicate 
 inquiry the double experience which W. Thackeray 
 had thus gained. India was then in the throes 
 of a great administrative crisis. The State- 
 ownership of the soil had passed from the native 
 Powers to the East India Company. How could 
 the Company best exercise that ownership in the 
 joint interest of itself and the people ? 
 
 According to the old Indian practice, a practice 
 with many and wide exceptions, the cultivators 
 paid their rent direct, or through their headmen, 
 to the Government officials. A countless army of 
 tax-gatherers spread over the country, each under- 
 ling squeezing as much as he could from the 
 villagers, and sending on as little as he dared to
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS 125 
 
 the distant treasury. If the native dynasties failed 
 to work such a system without oppression to the 
 husbandmen, could the foreign British rulers hope 
 to do so? The best chance of protecting the 
 people, and of securing the land-revenue, seemed 
 to good authorities to evolve a body of intermediate 
 proprietors— men of substance who would be re- 
 sponsible for the revenue to the Government, and 
 at the same time have an hereditary interest in the 
 welfare of the cultivators. 
 
 This view prevailed in Bengal, and was embodied 
 in the Permanent Settlement of 1 793. The Court of 
 Directors desired its extension to other provinces. 
 But the rural conditions of Madras were different 
 from those of Bengal. In many districts of southern 
 India the old village communes survived with suf- 
 ficient vitality to protect the peasants. To set up 
 intermediate owners between them and the Govern- 
 ment would merely create a new machinery of 
 oppression and a new charge to be squeezed out 
 of the cultivator. Lord William Bentinck found 
 himself surrounded by zealots for both the rival 
 systems ; one party urging a permanent setdement 
 with proprietors of our own making, another party
 
 126 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 insisting upon a peasant settlement year by year. 
 The Home authorities pressed for a decision. 
 Bentinck looked round for some calm-headed and 
 experienced man to inquire into the actual facts, 
 and chose William Thackeray for the duty. 
 
 It was not an easy duty. His decision, whatever 
 it might be, would give offence to the one side or 
 the other, and be bitterly attacked. Thackeray 
 reported with a fairness and a fullness of knowledge 
 which won Lord William Bentinck's gratitude. 
 The Governor not only endorsed his views, but he 
 resolved to give his adviser a position which would 
 enable him to carry them out. In 1806 he nomi- 
 nated William Thackeray, then only thirty, to be 
 a member of the Board of Revenue, defending the 
 appointment of so junior a member of the service 
 in a minute from which I take the following sen- 
 tences. It forms an example, happily common in 
 India, of a young man being raised to high office 
 without personal influence, and simply on the 
 record of his work. 
 
 ' I was introduced to the acquaintance of this 
 officer by the reputation of his character and 
 ability, and from the good opinion which further
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS 127 
 
 inquiry led me to entertain of him. I was induced 
 to ask the permission of Council that I might have 
 his assistance in determining how far a change in 
 the principle of the Permanent Settlement might 
 be advisable. Mr. Thackeray has greatly aided me 
 in this investigation, and in the course of our com- 
 munication I have observed in him much infor- 
 mation, the powers of sound reasoning, and great 
 benevolence. Attaching as I do the greatest con- 
 sequence to this question, and feeling that it will 
 equally tend to the great amelioration of the 
 condition of the mass of the people and to the pro- 
 gressive increase of the revenues of the Company, 
 I am anxious that there should be in the Board of 
 Revenue a member possessing the same sentiments 
 with myself. The life, both natural and political, 
 of an individual in India is very precarious, and 
 I should be sorry that with mine this discussion 
 should die also. I found in Mr. Thackeray the 
 sentiments which I entertained: they were not 
 adopted from me. They were the result of his 
 own observation.' 
 
 It thus fell to William Thackeray to play a leading 
 part in the land-setdement on which the future of
 
 128 THE THACKERAY S IN INDIA 
 
 southern India depended, and upon which the 
 rights of the people still rest. Lord William 
 Bentinck soon employed his young member of the 
 Board in a new field. In each part of the country 
 the settlement was preceded by a grand inquest or 
 Domesday book, recording all rights connected 
 with the ownership and cultivation of the soil. 
 In this inquest for eastern and central Madras 
 Thackeray had won his reputation. That reputa- 
 tion he was now to mature as sole commissioner 
 in the inquiry on the western coast. If we some- 
 times marvel at our success in India, it is in part 
 because we overlook the patient labour which built 
 it up. The following instructions of Lord William 
 Bentinck to Thackeray in November, 1 806, show 
 the care taken to secure that the Indian Domesday 
 should supply a complete record of the facts before 
 the form of settlement was decided. 
 
 ' It is the intention of his Lordship in Council 
 that you shall proceed in the first instance to the 
 province of Kanara, and having completed the in- 
 quiry entrusted to you in that province, you will 
 prosecute similar researches in the neighbouring 
 province of Malabar, whence you will visit the
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS 129 
 
 Ceded Districts for the purpose of perfecting your 
 investigation. 
 
 ' The objects of your research will be to ascertain 
 the present state of each province. The sources 
 of its revenue, especially the land-revenue. The 
 principle on which the assessment on the land is 
 formed. The question of produce payable by the 
 land-holders. The security taken for the due collec- 
 tion, and the mode of collecting the land-revenue. 
 The nature of land-tenures, the right of the land- 
 holders. The state of agriculture, the state of the 
 police and of the administration of justice as far as 
 it affects the revenue. The defects, if any, of the 
 present revenue management. . . . The condition, 
 opinions, and wants of the cultivators. The present 
 state of the country in respect to the comfort of the 
 people. The amount and security of the revenue 
 compared with other times and governments. 
 
 ' To the result of these inquiries you will add 
 your opinion on the best mode of administering the 
 revenue in future, and the mode of introducing 
 the Permanent Settlement in particular. You will 
 discuss fully every part of this subject with the local 
 revenue servants, and you will communicate freely 
 
 I
 
 130 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 with the people.' If the British settlement of India, 
 unlike the Norman settlement of England, proved 
 a basis of security instead of an instrument of 
 oppression to the subject races, it is partly because 
 our Indian Domesday book concerned itself not 
 more with the interests of the Crown and the land- 
 holders than with the rights of the tillers of the 
 soil. 
 
 William Thackeray's answers to the questions 
 thus proposed by Lord W. Bentinck have passed 
 into history. They form part of the evidence 
 submitted to Parliament in 181 2, with a view to 
 deciding on what terms the Company's charter 
 should be renewed. William Thackeray did not 
 possess the literary charm of style granted to 
 several of his brothers, and in so abundant a 
 measure to his illustrious nephew. His reports 
 give in scrupulous detail an exact record of what 
 he himself observed, and of the conclusions at which 
 he himself arrived. Although trained by Sir 
 Thomas Munro in the Peasant Settlement school, 
 and afterwards associated with him in giving legis- 
 lative effect to its principles, Thackeray carefully 
 notes the existence of superior tenures and pro-
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS 131 
 
 prietary rights wherever he found them. His 
 report of 1807 received high praise from the Madras 
 Government and the Court of Directors, and sur- 
 vives to this day as a model of painstaking and 
 impartial inquiry. 
 
 Such an inquiry formed in itself an administrative 
 education to the officer who conducted it. The 
 Malabar coast had an unique historical interest, and 
 disclosed a conflict of rights based on the claims 
 of successive races to the soil. The ' Male whence 
 the pepper comes ' of Cosmas Indicopleustes and 
 the Greeks, Malabar was also the scene of the 
 early Arabian trade with India and of the first 
 Portuguese settlements. A series of exquisite 
 lagoons fringed with tropical vegetation stretch 
 along the coast ; behind them rises a mountain wall 
 3,000 to 5,000 feet in height. Its mighty buttresses 
 of precipice and forest, the haunt of the tiger and 
 the bison, also formed the retreat of once powerful 
 but then crushed races. On this ancient coast 
 W. Thackeray had to mediate between land-rights, 
 some of them descended from the primaeval hunting 
 tribes, others from the dim period of the shepherd 
 kings, overlaid not only by the claims of a military 
 
 I a
 
 132 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 caste and a Hindu theocracy, but also by a 
 Christian community imagined to be as old as 
 St. Thomas, and certainly dating- from the patriarchs 
 of Antioch. A fierce Musalman population of 
 Moplas, left behind by the early Arab commerce, 
 constantly broke out in partly agrarian and partly 
 fanatical risings. 
 
 The country passed under British rule in 1791, 
 and the generation which had grown up in the 
 state of anarchy still survived when Thackeray 
 came upon the scene. Perhaps the most interest- 
 ing class whose rights he had to reconcile with the 
 claims of others were the Nairs. This soldier race 
 still practised the primitive form of marriage known 
 as polyandry, by which a woman may have several 
 husbands, and property descends by inheritance 
 not to a man's sons but to his sister's children. 
 A Malabar drama recounts with much humour the 
 quarrels between the five husbands of a Nair lady, 
 ending with their return to domestic concord. 
 
 While William Thackeray was studying this 
 congeries of races, and mediating between them, 
 he was sapping his own constitution. The malaria 
 of the coast strip and hill jungles laid hold of him
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS 133 
 
 with a grip that he never shook off. In 1 810 he 
 was promoted to be Chief Secretary to the Madras 
 Government, but after struggling for three years 
 under medical treatment, he had to be sent home 
 for the recovery of his health in 181 3. The court 
 of Directors cordially recognized his services in a 
 despatch, and again on his return to India in 181 6. 
 
 After intermediate appointments, including the 
 charge of two important Districts, he was deputed 
 in 1 818 to the northern Madras frontier of Ganjam, 
 says the official record, ' to report on the best means 
 of establishing permanent tranquillity.' Again he 
 laid out the lines on which a wild territory was to 
 be brought under peaceful administration, and re- 
 ceived as reward a judgeship in the High Court of 
 Madras, By the age of forty William Thackeray 
 had thus impressed his personality on the settlement 
 of three great areas of southern India; from its 
 south-western coast, through its central districts, to 
 its northernmost province. 
 
 In 1820 Sir Thomas Munro returned to India as 
 Governor of Madras, In terms of the Court of 
 Directors' despatch, laying down the new consti- 
 tution of government, William Thackeray was
 
 134 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 appointed a provisional member of Council, and 
 took his seat on June lo, 1820. Three days later 
 he also became President of the Board of Revenue, 
 or executive head of the internal administration. 
 But he did not long- enjoy his honours in Council, 
 or his renewed companionship with his old friend 
 Munro. In November, 1822, he had again to fly 
 for life, but proposed only a trip to the Cape of 
 Good Hope, whence he trusted ' in a few months 
 to return to the public service.' He died upon the 
 voyage on Jan. 11, 1823, aged forty-four years and 
 eight months. 
 
 The whole Presidency lamented his loss. Sir 
 Thomas Munro recorded a last tribute to ' his 
 integrity and long, zealous, and able services.' The 
 Government went into public mourning for fourteen 
 days. A Gazette extraordinary ordered 'that the 
 flag of Fort St. George be immediately hoisted half 
 staff high, and continue so until sunset this evening, 
 and that minute guns, forty-seven in number, cor- 
 responding to the age of the deceased {stc)^ shall 
 be fired from the ramparts of Fort St. George.' 
 William Thackeray's true memorial is to be found 
 in the great State Papers which he wrote, and in
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN MADRAS 135 
 
 the prosperity of the provinces to which he brought 
 justice and peace. 
 
 The careers of his two younger brothers in the 
 Madras Civil Service were much shorter ones. 
 Webb Thackeray arrived as a Writer in 1 806, at the 
 age of eighteen. He died within a year, but not 
 before he had won notice for a clever little grammar 
 of the Hindustani language in verse. His first six 
 months of service were passed as assistant in the 
 Board of Revenue at head-quarters, his second six 
 as Assistant in the Belary District. He died- at 
 the mouth of a mountain pass while he was being 
 carried to the coast in the hope of benefit from the 
 sea-air. His chief lamented his loss in a letter to 
 the Government not only for ' the very great assist- 
 ance ' which the poor youth had been able to render 
 him, but also as an officer ' possessed of the finest 
 disposition,' and of a facility in corresponding in the 
 Hindustani language described as ' wonderfully great.' 
 
 The next brother in the Madras Civil Service was 
 St. John Thackeray, born 1791. Arriving in 1809, 
 as one of the first civilians sent out by the East 
 India College which g^ew into Haileybury, St. John 
 Thackeray spent his first three years in the Board
 
 136 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 of Revenue and in the diplomatic or ' Political ' 
 Department of the Government. Five more years 
 of District work completed his training, and in 1818 
 he was chosen, in flattering terms, to help to bring 
 into order the territories just won from the Marathas. 
 It seemed, indeed, to be the common lot of the 
 Thackerays to introduce the British administration 
 into newly annexed provinces. 
 
 For that work St. John Thackeray paid the price 
 of his life. The loyal chief of Kittur died in 1824, 
 leaving no issue. The usual family intrigues followed. 
 A deed of adoption was forged ; the insurgent 
 party seized the Kittur fort and defied our Govern- 
 ment. To save bloodshed St. John Thackeray 
 advanced unguarded with a flag of truce on October 
 23, 1824, and was killed. His gallantry and self- 
 devotion form an example of that calm civil courage 
 which has acted like a spell in each new province of 
 British India. The Government despatch speaks 
 of his death ' as a public calamity.' In the reduc- 
 tion of the fort another District Officer, the nephew 
 of Sir Thomas Munro, was also slain. 
 
 The two Thackeray brothers who had entered 
 the Bengal Service were already in their graves.
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN BENGAL 137 
 
 Of Richmond, the great novelist's father, the next 
 chapter will speak. Thomas Thackeray, eighth 
 child of the Sylhet elephant-hunter, was appointed 
 an Infantry cadet in 1803, at the age of fourteen. 
 Promoted to a lieutenancy in 1805, and never rising 
 above that grade, he served long enough to leave 
 behind the most striking picture that exists 
 of a Bengal regiment in the old time of British 
 conquest, and to die a hero's death. 
 
 ' I am at great pains,' he wrote, ' to fill up the 
 vacancies which occur in my company by brothers 
 of the best sepoys, and seldom entertain a recruit 
 who is not in some way related to a man already in 
 the company. I have succeeded so well that I have 
 now four full brothers of one family, three of 
 another, and out of ninety men I have not twenty 
 who are not connected, either by consanguinity or 
 marriage, with some of their comrades. Men natu- 
 rally become attached to the service in which they 
 have so many ties.' A Bengal regiment thus formed 
 a family fighting force of the military and Brahman 
 castes, recruited and handled by captains or lieu- 
 tenants with a freedom of initiative which a colonel- 
 commandant would now envy.
 
 138 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 In 1 8 14 Lieutenant Thomas Thackeray took part 
 in the Nepal War. Badly wounded while storming 
 a frontier fort in October, he managed to scrawl 
 a message home, ' Don't be afraid ; I'm very little 
 hurt.' Then, with his left hand, a couple of months 
 later: 'The day after I was wounded I received 
 your letter of the 17th of April, which gave me 
 more pleasure than my wound gave me pain.' He 
 hopes that ' very shortly my right hand will be able 
 to apologize for this awkward attempt of my left to 
 express my affection for all of you, my dear sisters 
 and brothers.' 
 
 The right hand was never to apologize. Despite 
 its disablement. Lieutenant Thackeray insisted on 
 going into action. On December 2^, 18 14, our 
 troops were driven back from a Nepalese stockade. 
 He volunteered to cover their retreat with his Light 
 Company against, says the record, ' a strong and 
 overpowering column of Gurkhas.' Nine times he 
 charged the enemy, and eight times he stopped 
 their pursuit. In the ninth, his company seems to 
 have fairly cut its way through their line, and was 
 surrounded by their whole force. Thackeray and 
 his gallant ensign fell, with fifty-seven of his brave
 
 THACKERAY'S UNCLES IN BENGAL 139 
 
 sepoys. The regiment rescued his body, and, 
 defying every rule of caste, testified their admiration 
 for their champion by themselves carrying his corpse 
 to the grave. 
 
 Nor were statelier tributes wanting in high places. 
 'Justice to extraordinary valour,' wrote the head 
 of the army, ' demands from the Commander-in- 
 chief the recorded expression of his unfeigned regret 
 at the loss the service has sustained in the fall of 
 Lieutenant Thackeray.' ' The heroic conduct of the 
 Light Company, 2nd Battalion, under the command 
 of Lieutenant Thackeray,' runs the Government of 
 India's Despatch, 'demands the peculiar and re- 
 corded tribute of the Governor-g-eneral's approba- 
 tion and applause. His Lordship deeply laments 
 the untimely fate of Lieutenant Thackeray, and the 
 brave officers and men who perished with him, in 
 the performance of the most heroic acts of devotion 
 to the cause in which they were engaged.' 
 
 I have said that the Calcutta graveyards are 
 strewn so thick with heroes as to leave small space 
 for separate monuments. So each frontier of 
 British India is traced out with the tombstones 
 of our gallant dead, for whom there was no time
 
 14© THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 to write epitaphs. The sole memorial of Lieutenant 
 Thomas Thackeray on the Heights of Jeytuck is the 
 mention of his name on a slab to his brave ensign, 
 Wilson, who died with him. 
 
 The careers of the six Thackeray brothers disclose 
 a great Indian family in an aspect perhaps little 
 realized. We think of such families as prosperous 
 cliques who, apart from personal merit, were pitch- 
 forked into a lucrative service, and retired without 
 effort to various degrees of opulence. The walls of 
 our parish churches record many such lives ; a few 
 are commemorated in our abbeys and cathedrals. 
 But we forget that they were the survivals, not of 
 the fittest, but of the most fortunate. The accurate 
 Rennell computed in the last century ' that scarce 
 one out of seventy men returns to his native country.' 
 This sketch of the Thackeray brethren shows what 
 became of the rest. Not under cathedral roofs 
 nor in any consecrated ground, wrote the noble 
 Dalhousie on his tablet to a young civilian and 
 soldier who met death hand-in-hand, but amid the 
 jungles or on the furthest frontiers of India lie our 
 heroes who died doing their duty.
 
 [ ui ] 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 
 
 Richmond Thackeray, father of the novelist 
 and second son of the Sylhet elephant-hunter, was 
 born, according to the Family Book, on September 
 I, 1 78 1, Sent to Eton in 1 791, at the age of ten, 
 he remained there till 1 796, and received a nomina- 
 tion to the Company's Civil Service through the 
 influence of his Aunt Rennell's friend, [Sir] Hugh 
 Inglis. After the usual training in merchants' 
 accounts he sailed for Bengal in his seventeenth 
 year. His arrival as Writer in the Calcutta records 
 bears date October 27, 1798. But he was almost 
 immediately struck down by one of the maladies 
 which lie in wait for newcomers at the close of the 
 rains, and the doctors sent him off on a health 
 voyage to Madras. 
 
 There he hoped to meet his eldest brother, 
 William, who had been settled in the Southern
 
 142 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Presidency since 1796. Instead of a hospitable 
 welcome and a quiet home, he found Madras in the 
 full blast of preparations for the Mysore War, and 
 his brother transferred to Vizagapatam, several 
 hundred miles up the coast. ' My dear Mater,' 
 Richmond wrote to his mother on February 17, 
 1 799, ' it is intensely hot and I am obliged to go 
 out in the sun. There are no palankeens here, for 
 the bearers are all gone with the army, which has 
 taken the field.' He wistfully pictures to himself 
 his mother's ' routs going on at Hadley as they 
 were last winter,' and ' Pater digging with Old 
 Anthony ' at the flower beds. ' I would give any- 
 thing to be at home. I would even be glad to 
 carry gravel in a basket on my shoulder in the 
 garden ! It was this time last year we made the 
 new walk : it will be wonderfully altered when I see 
 it again ! ' The poor lad was not to see it again. 
 He lies for ever by a coarse brick path in a land 
 where no gravel is. 
 
 From his first illness Richmond Thackeray in 
 due course recovered, and returned to Calcutta. 
 There he studied for a time in the College of Fort 
 William, which Lord Wellesley founded with mag-
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 1^3 
 
 nificent intentions in 1800. Richmond Thackeray, 
 like his brothers, seems to have been clever at 
 languages. He took a first-class in Arabic, with 
 distinction in Persian, and was appointed assistant 
 to the ' Collector ' or chief of Midnapur, then 
 a frontier tract of Lower Bengal. Although still 
 open to predatory incursions, the British border- 
 lands had been tamed since his father hunted 
 elephants in Sylhet. With the Permanent Settle- 
 ment in 1793, the heroic age of District administra- 
 tion passed away. The landholders' status became 
 one of right instead of favour, their armed retinues 
 gave place to a police, courts of law superseded 
 and controlled the personal rule of the British 
 Collector. 
 
 The year of Thackeray's arrival, 1 798, marked 
 also the commencement of the Gk)vernor-General- 
 ship destined to consummate this change. The 
 Marquis of Wellesley brought to his task an impe- 
 rious will such as India had not felt since the days 
 of Clive, and an authority more ample than even 
 Clive found it possible to enforce. Lord Wellesley 's 
 rule completed the reform of the Civil Service, and 
 transmuted District life in Bengal from poetry to
 
 144 77/E THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 prose. Little of the picturesque or epical can 
 therefore be expected in Richmond Thackeray's 
 service. The elephant-catching- and ship-building 
 ventures of his father were gone for ever. 
 
 Nevertheless, there was still hard work to be 
 done. The Collector of Midnapur, as Warden of 
 the Marches, held in check the wild highlands on the 
 west, and the Maratha province of Orissa on his 
 southern border. The hill-country, now known as 
 the Tributary States, formed a tangle of inaccessible 
 gorges and forests under primitive tribal sway, or 
 split up among Hindu fort-holders who had wedged 
 themselves in among the non- Hindu ancient clans. 
 
 To some of these clans immemorial custom 
 prescribed that a state of war must always be 
 presumed against all neighbours with whom there 
 was not at the moment an express truce. The 
 flesh and bones of human sacrifices were yearly 
 ploughed into the furrows, in honour of the Earth - 
 Goddess, at the spring festival. Others still used 
 the flint arrow-heads of the stone age. Certain 
 tribes, ' the Leaf Wearers,' were for the first time 
 clothed with cotton strips at a solemn gathering 
 held by their British officer in our own times. .
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 145 
 
 During the years preceding Thackeray's arrival 
 in Midnapur, that District had iormed the theatre 
 of stirring events. ' Violences of the Rajas,' ' in- 
 roads by the Marathas,' 'confiscations of lands,' 
 ' depredations ' and ' disturbances ' of many kinds, 
 are not infrequent headings in my excerpts from 
 the manuscript records. But at the beginning of the 
 present century the British Government took this 
 outlying tract sternly in hand. The Marathas 
 had scourged our Midnapur border to the north of 
 their Orissa province with whips : Lord Wellesley 
 chastised them with scorpions. The Company's 
 factory on the Midnapur frontier, notwithstanding 
 reinforcements of troops, was subjected to a series 
 of ' acts of violence.' Indeed, the Marathas had 
 devastated right across the District to the Hugli 
 estuary, and turned a favourite river-resort of 
 Warren Hastings into an absolute waste. In 1803 
 Lord Wellesley sent an army into Orissa, drove 
 out the Marathas, and annexed the province to 
 British India. 
 
 Richmond Thackeray's first years of work were 
 the ones immediately preceding this denouement. 
 He learned the routine of a young District Officer, 
 
 K
 
 146 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 superintending the collection of the revenue, selling- 
 up landholders who refused to pay, and settling 
 their allowances, embanking rivers, bringing under 
 assessment estates which had evaded taxation, 
 breaking up robber gangs, and looking after the 
 Company's salt-manufacture along the coast. He 
 played a very subordinate part, and for a brief 
 period, in Midnapur; but he seems to have given 
 satisfaction to his superiors. In 1 802, after being 
 transferred for a short time to his father's old 
 District of Dacca, he was appointed assistant to the 
 Secretary of the Board of Revenue, Calcutta, and 
 to the Persian and Bengali translator. 
 
 In 1802, also, with the strong family affection 
 which breathes in the letter from Madras to his 
 mother, Richmond Thackeray, like his father before 
 him, made a home for two sisters, Emily and 
 Augusta. They did not, however, remain long 
 with him. In 1803 Emily married at Calcutta a 
 young civilian, John Talbot Shakespear, with whom 
 she was destined to share a brilliant career. Shake- 
 spear, after figuring in the prize-lists of the College 
 of Fort William, was in 1803 appointed assistant 
 to the Collector of Birbhum, an office held, as we
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 147 
 
 shall see, in that year by his brother-in-law 
 Richmond Thackeray. Augusta also married a 
 civilian, Mr, Elliot, ' her brother's dearest friend.' 
 
 Of Emily Shakespear's nine children who grew 
 up, eight entered the civil or military service of 
 the East India Company or married officers in these 
 services. Her eldest son. Colonel John Dowdeswell 
 Shakespear, a noble, chivalrous figure, was believed 
 in the family to have formed the original of ' Colonel 
 Newcome.' Her second daughter, Augfusta, was the 
 wife of General Sir John Low, who crowned his 
 splendid services in camps and courts as British Resi- 
 dent in Oudh during the critical years preceding its 
 annexation. ' No man,' wrote Kaye, ' knew the 
 temper of the natives better. He could see with 
 their eyes, speak with their tongues, and read 
 with their understandings.' 
 
 Another son was Colonel Sir Richmond Shake- 
 spear, who in 1840 obtained deliverance for the 
 Russian prisoners in Central Asia, and in the fol- 
 lowing year rescued our own ladies and children 
 from captivity after the annihilation of the British 
 force in the Afghan snows. But it were long to 
 follow the several careers of that g^allant brother- 
 K 2
 
 148 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 hood, in each one of whom blended the strength 
 and gentleness which make the flower of manhood. 
 Of this Colonel Sir Richmond Shakespear, his 
 cousin Thackeray says in one of his Roundabout 
 Papers : 
 
 '"Can I do anything for you?" I remember 
 the kind fellow asking. He was always asking that 
 question of kinsmen ; of all widows and orphans ; 
 of all the poor ; of young men who might need his 
 purse or his service. His purse was at the com- 
 mand of all. His kind hand was always open. It 
 was a gracious fate which sent him to rescue widows 
 and captives. Where would they have found a 
 champion more chivalrous, a protector more loving 
 and tender ? ' ' 
 
 Emily Thackeray was not unworthy to be the 
 mother of such sons. Her journal, jotted down 
 for her children at school in England, discloses 
 the clear eyesight and rapid realistic style which 
 seem to have been the common inheritance of the 
 Thackerays in that generation. Here is a little 
 vignette, one of hundreds, dashed off while she and 
 her husband were accompanying the Governor- 
 General, Lord Moira, on his tour of 18 14. The
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 149 
 
 grandiose Anglo-Indian life of that time rises in 
 a moment before us. We embarked, she writes, 
 in a ' fleet of four hundred boats, which made a gay 
 and brilliant display on the river Hugli. The State 
 barge was painted green, richly ornamented with 
 gold. Another pinnace, of equal dimensions and 
 almost equal beauty, was appropriated to the use 
 of his lordship's children, and a third, The Castle, 
 was a banqueting and audience boat. A splendid 
 barge for the reception of the band, and a large 
 vessel fitted up with all the conveniences of a kitchen, 
 were also in attendance, all of them painted green, 
 with gilt mouldings to match the State pinnace. 
 We dined with his lordship on board The Castle. 
 The band of Her Majesty's 44th Regiment played 
 during the evening on the barge, which was 
 anchored near us.' 
 
 Emily Thackeray, like all her six brothers who 
 went to India, died there ; her husband also died 
 on his voyage from Calcutta to the Cape of Good 
 Hope, and was buried at sea. 
 
 In the year of Emily's marriage, 1803, Richmond 
 Thackeray was sent as officiating Collector to 
 another frontier District, Birbhum, on the west of
 
 150 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Lower Bengal. In Bengal as in Madras, from the 
 elephant hunter of Sylhet downwards, the Thack- 
 erays seemed destined to the charge of newly 
 annexed or border tracts. But the authorities at 
 head-quarters did not lose sight of Richmond, and 
 his work in the provinces was pleasantly intermitted 
 by advancement in the central Board of Revenue at 
 Calcutta. 
 
 Birbhum, his first independent charge, consisted 
 of two ancient principalities, which had been re- 
 duced with some difficulty during the preceding 
 half-century. It lay oh the north of his former 
 District Midnapur, and then included a lowland 
 tract bordering on the Gangetic valley on the east, 
 together with a vast region of forests and highlands 
 rising westwards towards the Central Provinces. 
 
 The four years, 1803- 1807, during which Thack- 
 eray remained,"with some intervals, in charge of it, 
 are memorable for the breaking up of the old fron- 
 tier Houses of that part of Bengal. The Musalman 
 Raja of Birbhum, the descendant of the hereditary 
 Wardens of the Marches under the Mughal Empire, 
 died in 1802, leaving his estates in ruin, and his 
 family to the bounty of the British Government.
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 151 
 
 Thackeray found the yet more ancient Hindu 
 Rajas of Bishnupur, which formed the southern 
 part of the District, in an equally sorrowful plight. 
 The hill Raja of Panchet on the west, with his 
 jungle territory of nearly 3,000 square miles, had 
 also fallen into arrears of revenue, and suffered 
 the indignity of the attachment of his lands, and 
 the arrest of his person for debt. 
 
 The truth is that the old ruling families of the 
 frontier played too long at keeping up the style of 
 semi-independent princes after they had, in reality, 
 passed from feudatories into subjects. They could 
 not bear to part with their courtly pomp and 
 armed retinues. The Musalman Raja of Birbhum 
 had shut himself up in his fort, because custom forbad 
 him to go forth except at the head of his house- 
 hold cavalry, and the horses were either dead or 
 too starved to bear their riders. The Hindu Rajas 
 of Bishnupur boasted of an unbroken pedigree 
 through some sixty generations from 715 A.D., with 
 a semi-divine progenitor in the still more distant 
 background. A native chronicler describes their 
 capital, with its walls seven miles in 'length, as 
 ' more beautiful than the beautiful house of Indra
 
 152 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 in heaven.' When Thackeray took charge of the 
 District, one mangy elephant chained under a tree, 
 and a monster rusty cannon ten feet and a half long, 
 formed the sole relics of their ancient magnificence. 
 Even the family idol had been pawned to a money- 
 lender in Calcutta. 
 
 The great famine of 1770 had put the last touch 
 to their ruin. When the local records open, the 
 young Birbhum Raja scarcely passed the first year 
 of his majority before being confined for debt ; 
 the venerable Raja of Bishnupur, after years of 
 weary duress, was let out of custody only to die. 
 The Company had, in fact, ceased to desire from 
 them the military service by which they held their 
 territories under the Mughal Emperors. What it 
 wanted was revenue, not troops. Such of the 
 ancient border Houses as could not accommodate 
 themselves to the change had, up to 1793, been from 
 time to time dispossessed of their estates, while 
 their personal property was sold for arrears of 
 the land-tax. The Permanent Settlement in that 
 year, although giving to solvent proprietors a 
 status which they never before enjoyed, provided 
 a sharp remedy for those who still insisted on
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 153 
 
 Spending their rental on military pomp instead 
 of paying the due quota into the District treasury. 
 Under its provisions, estates which fell into arrears 
 were sold by public auction. 
 
 This was the condition of Birbhum when Rich- 
 mond Thackeray took charge of it in 1803. One of 
 the questions he had to deal with was the subdivision 
 of his vast frontier jurisdiction — far too large for 
 effective control by a single chief. In 1805 the 
 Legislature separated its western region into a new 
 administrative District, called the Jungle Tracts. 
 
 The small fief-holders who held the passes be- 
 tween the hill-country and the lowlands of Birbhum 
 had run the same course as their over-lords the 
 Rajas. The Company, having imposed peace on 
 the border, no longer needed the feudal defences, 
 and tried to resume or assess the lands assigned 
 for that purpose. Hence subterfuges and re- 
 sistance, secret transfers, defaults, arrests of the 
 petty chieftains of the passes, and forced sales of 
 their property: a huge imbroglio, in the midst 
 of which Thackeray found himself plunged. For 
 a time it seemed as if the whole watch and ward 
 on the frontier would join with the criminal classes
 
 154 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 in a confederacy of plunder. Thackeray did his 
 share in bringing about a better state of things. 
 But several Collectors spent their energies on the 
 task before order could be evolved. The old 
 guards of the passes were gradually transformed 
 into an inefficient rural police, paying a quit- 
 rent for their military grants of land. 
 
 The perplexities of a debased currency, mal- 
 practices by his official underlings, the devastations 
 of river-floods, and depredations by gang-robbers, 
 occupied the leisure moments of Richmond Thack- 
 eray in Birbhum. But the tide had already turned. 
 A more enterprising class of proprietors were 
 settling on the broken -up estates of the feudal 
 aristocracy, and the work of reconstruction began. 
 The provision of allowances for dispossessed land- 
 owners ceased to be a main duty of the Collector ; 
 new problems arose out of the extended culti- 
 vation going on all around. Thackeray impressed 
 his personality on his subordinates, and was long 
 remembered as the hospitable head of the District. 
 An aged cook, whose recollections I noted down 
 in Birbhum in 1864, still spoke of the generous 
 kitchen of ' Tikri Saheb.'
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 155 
 
 In 1804-5 Thackeray took charge for a short 
 time of the District of Tipperah, on the opposite 
 or eastern frontier of Bengal, and became Sub- 
 Secretary to the Board of Revenue at Calcutta. 
 Returning to Birbhum in 1806, he was appointed 
 Judge of Ramgarh, then a wild, outlying tract 
 of hill and forest valleys to the west of Birbhum, 
 but now one of the great coal-fields of Bengal, 
 In 1 807 he received the reward of his District work 
 by promotion to the Secretaryship of the Board 
 of Revenue, which controlled from the capital 
 the general administration of Bengal. In 1808 he 
 oflSciated as Judge of Midnapur, thus returning as 
 head of the District to the scene of his first labours. 
 
 With the interval of his judgeship at Midnapur, 
 he seems to have resided from 1807 in Calcutta. 
 As Secretary to the Board of Revenue he held 
 a considerable place in the official and social life 
 of the capital. The years during which he was at 
 the Board preceded the Parliamentary inquiry that 
 abolished the Company's Indian trade and threw 
 it open to the nation. But although many ques- 
 tions of the first importance passed under review, 
 Thackeray's position as Secretary merged his
 
 156 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 individuality in the collective proceedings of the 
 Board. On the other hand, we catch glimpses 
 of him in contemporary journals, flitting in a genial 
 and even sparkling fashion through the Calcutta 
 gaieties of the time. 
 
 In 1807, for example, he appears in the Calcutta 
 Gazette^ with the Honourable Mountstuart Elphin- 
 stone and two other young civilians, as giving a 
 ' masqued ball of peculiar splendour.' ' The rooms, 
 overspread with green and flowery foliage,' wrote 
 the local Jeames, ' presented a scene of rural beauty,' 
 and before half- past ten were filled with 300 masque- 
 raders. Among them ' a quack doctor anxious to 
 dispose of his medicines, which had the singular 
 property of curing the diseases of the mind,' directed 
 his harangues ' chiefly to the female part of his 
 audience, whom he professed to cure of their pro- 
 pensity to scandal.' ' An ambassador from the 
 Emperor of Morocco — a capital mask at least ten 
 feet high attended by his armour-bearer, a dwarf.' 
 ' A nurse, with a babe in leading strings measuring 
 about six feet high. This amiable infant managed 
 its rattle with great address.' 
 
 And so on through a quaint list. The band of
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 157 
 
 Her Majesty's 67th Regiment made music to which 
 the more stately of the company danced In costumes 
 of many ages and nations. But the fun seems to 
 have been rather rougher than we are now ac- 
 customed to. 'A ghost about twelve feet high 
 was encountered by a Jack -tar, who mistook his 
 night-cap for a mainsail, which Jack instantly pro- 
 ceeded to reef.' A barber tried to forcibly shave 
 ' a tailor sitting cross-legged on his shop-board ' — 
 ' a most active tradesman ' was this artist in soap- 
 suds, ' though we cannot in conscience recommend 
 him as a very safe and careful operator.' 
 
 The sale-list of 'the elegant property of Richmond 
 Thackeray, Esq., about to leave the Presidency,' 
 January, 1806, when re-transferred to Birbhum, also 
 appears in the Calcutta Gazette. It suggests 
 a somewhat magnificent style of life for a young 
 civilian of seven years' service. A little armoury 
 of guns, swords, ' Persian scimitars and poniards, 
 in velvet scabbards very richly mounted in silver ' ; 
 five high-class horses, including ' the young, very 
 active and highly dressed, light grey Arab saddle- 
 horse Nimble^ of ' a fine generous temper ' ; with 
 * a handsome Europe-built coach lined with yellow
 
 158 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 cloth ' ; and ' very fashionable Household Furniture 
 in white and gold,' — would have satisfied the aspira- 
 tions of most bachelors just turned twenty- four. 
 But Richmond Thackeray also cultivated the arts 
 and bel/es lettres with the aid of ' a large Mahogany 
 Box of Reeves's colours, with silver mountings ; an 
 excellent library of books; and very fine statues 
 in plaister of Paris.' 'Ackermann's collection of 
 beautiful Engravings for 1804-5, exquisitely coloured 
 and highly finished in large vellum folios, richly 
 gilt and lettered, imported on one of the last ships, 
 and cost upwards of 100 guineas,' shows that the 
 youthful virtuoso was quite up to date. 
 
 He seems, indeed, to have been a young gentle- 
 man of many tastes. 'A capital patent Saloon 
 Organ, with fine barrels of the latest and most 
 approved tunes, having the flageolet, tabor drum, 
 triangle, diapason principal, twelfth and flute stops,' 
 discoursed music for lady guests at 'his house in 
 Chouringhee.' 'Valuable Paintings, Prints, and 
 Convex Mirrors, in rich burnished gold frames' 
 adorned its walls — and are set forth in the choice 
 language of the Calcutta auctioneer. 
 
 Needless to say that the owner of all these fine
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 159 
 
 things figures in the functions with which India, 
 then as now, welcomed the coming and sped the 
 departing Governor-General. He formed one of the 
 Committee appointed to draw up the famous farewell 
 address from ' the British inhabitants of Calcutta ' 
 to Lord Minto ; and altogether appears as a con- 
 siderable personage in the social and public life of 
 the capital. 
 
 In 1 8 10 he married at Calcutta one of the 
 reigning beauties of the day. He himself had 
 an attractive personality, and his picture, which 
 hangs in the drawing-room of his grand-daughter 
 the authoress of 0/d Kensington^ resembles the 
 striking portrait of his Madras brother, William, 
 already described. 'It is that of a very young 
 man in an old-fashioned dress and brass buttons,' 
 writes this lady, ' and white handkerchief round his 
 neck; with brown hair falling loose, with bright 
 soft hazel eyes and arched black eyebrows. The 
 face is long and narrow, the nose is long, the 
 complexion is clear, the mouth delicate and yet 
 not without a certain determination and humour. 
 The eyes have a peculiar out-looking depth of 
 expression which I remember in my Father ' [the
 
 l6o THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 Novelist]. ' He looks simple and good and 
 sensitive.' 
 
 His bride, Anne Becher, was connected with an 
 old Bengal civilian family, noted for the tenderness 
 of its women. Perhaps the two most touching 
 stories, carved on the Calcutta gravestones of the 
 last century, are those on the tombs of her kins- 
 man, Richard Becher, and his young wife. They 
 shared in the expulsion of the English at the time 
 of the Black Hole, June 1 756, and in the miseries of 
 the fever-stricken refuge in the delta waiting for 
 deliverance. During that long-drawn-out agony 
 they watched over a dying child. On December 14, 
 Admiral Watson's fleet hove in sight ; but exactly 
 a fortnight before it dropped anchor at Fulta, 
 Richard and Charlotte Becher had buried their 
 infant. 
 
 The poor mother, herself but a girl of eighteen, 
 never got over her sorrow. In 1 757 she began to 
 fade away. Next year Warren Hastings writes to 
 her husband, 'greatly concerned to hear that Mrs. 
 Becher's indisposition has increased,' and begging 
 him to send her for change of air to Mrs. Hastings' 
 house in the country. ' After suffering with patience
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL l6l 
 
 a long illness occasioned by grief for the death of 
 an only daughter,' says her epitaph, they laid her 
 three years later in the same churchyard that 
 contains the graves of Charnock, the founder, and 
 Admiral Watson, the deliverer, of Calcutta. 
 
 The inscription on her husband's tomb is an 
 even more pathetic one. Richard Becher arrived 
 in Calcutta as a Writer in 1743. Rising through 
 the various grades of the Company's service as 
 Factor, Junior Merchant, and Senior Merchant, he 
 had reached the rank of Fourth in the Bengal 
 Council and Chief of Dacca at the time of 
 the Black Hole, 1756. In the following year he 
 returned with the survivors of the English to Cal- 
 cutta, leaving his little daughter in her grave amid 
 the swamps of the delta, and bringing back his 
 sorely stricken wife. Like the other chief servants 
 of the Company, he received a public donation of 
 ;^2 7,000 from the new Nawab, by whom we super- 
 seded the prince under whose orders our country- 
 men had perished in the Black Hole. But unlike 
 several of his colleagues, Richard Becher took no 
 private gift, nor did the searching scrutiny of 
 Parliament discover any sums, whether avowed or 
 
 L
 
 l62 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 unavowed, accepted by him in the various subse- 
 quent revolutions and changes of native rulers. 
 
 During those years, while a handful of English- 
 men were winning Plassey and creating an empire 
 for the British nation in India, the Court of 
 Directors was split into bitter factions. The party 
 hostile to Clive, or envious of his success, having 
 got the upper hand, vented its ill-humour in acri- 
 monious despatches to Bengal. We saw how, in 
 the previous century, the Court rewarded Char- 
 nock for his splendid defence which saved the 
 English from extinction in Bengal \ by telling him 
 that — ' it was not your wit or contrivance, but God 
 Almighty's good providence, which hath always 
 graciously superintended the affairs of the Com- 
 pany.' Clive was not a worn-out old man like 
 Charnock, and he frankly expressed his indignation. 
 On December 29, 1 759, he and his Council remon- 
 strated in very plain terms. 
 
 ' Permit us to say,' runs their despatch, ' that the 
 diction of your letter is most unworthy [of] your- 
 selves and us, in whatever relation considered, either 
 as master to servants or gentlemen to gentlemen. 
 
 * Ante, p. 44.
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 1 63 
 
 Mere inadvertences and casual neglects have been 
 treated in such language and sentiments as nothing 
 but the most glaring and premeditated frauds could 
 warrant. . . . Faithful to little purpose, if the 
 breath of scandal has power to blow away in one 
 hour the merits of many years' service.' 
 
 Clive left Bengal in the following February, 
 1 760, and was temporarily succeeded as Governor 
 by his second in Council, Holwell, the hero and 
 historian of the Black Hole. The Court of Direc- 
 tors, having no longer to deal with the conqueror 
 of Flassey, took their revenge on his Council who 
 together with Clive had signed the despatch. 
 A full year afterwards, on January 21, 1761, they 
 wrote to the Governor of Bengal : ' We do posi- 
 tively order and direct that immediately upon the 
 receipt of this letter, all those persons remaining 
 in the Company's service who signed the said letter 
 of the 29th December ... be dismissed from the 
 Company's service.' Holwell and Richard Becher 
 were the two chief signatories. 
 
 Holwell had already applied for leave to quit the 
 Company's service owing to the ' many unmerited 
 marks of resentment which I have lately received 
 L 2
 
 164 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 from the present Court of Directors.' On Richard 
 Becher, who after eighteen years' service had made 
 no considerable fortune, the blow fell. 
 
 Holwell retired at the age of fifty, to enjoy 
 thirty-eight years of literary and social distinction 
 in England. Several of his works may be read 
 with pleasure at this day ; his narrative of the 
 Black Hole is a masterpiece of realism which will 
 live to all time. Voltaire singled him out among 
 the English Company's servants for his devotion to 
 Eastern learning : ' Un homme qui n'a voyage que 
 pour s'instruire,' ' who has learned the language 
 alike of the modern and ancient Brahmans, and 
 translated sublime pieces from the earliest works in 
 their sacred language.' ' These things,' continued 
 Voltaire, ' are more worthy of the study of the wise 
 man than the quarrels of dealers about muslins and 
 dyed stuffs.' 
 
 Richard Becher's lot was very different. Dis- 
 missed the service in 1761, he remained out of 
 employ for six years. But the necessities of the 
 Company compelled the Court of Directors to 
 swallow their angry words. Lord Clive returned 
 as Governor of Bengal in 1 765. Richard Becher,
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 1 65 
 
 designated by him as one of the men to carry on 
 his great task, was reappointed to the Bengal 
 Council in 1 767. He held that high office during 
 the first years of Thackeray's grandfather in Cal- 
 cutta, and was promoted in 1769 to be Resident 
 at the Court of Murshidabad, with control, so far 
 as we then ventured to interfere, of the revenue 
 administration of Bengal. 
 
 Richard Becher will ever deserve honour as 
 almost the only Englishman who, amid misrepre- 
 sentation and calumny, strove to grapple with 
 the great famine of 1770. What one man could 
 do for the Province throughout its agony he 
 accomplished. But no one felt more bitterly than 
 himself the feebleness of the State relief, and 
 his was the pen that awakened the conscience 
 of his countrymen. Any effective dealing with 
 famine was impossible under the divided control, 
 half native, half English, which still prevailed in 
 Bengal. In the words of the Indian proverb, it was 
 watering the top of a tree whose roots were cut. 
 Richard Becher got small thanks for his labours. 
 Yet a century afterwards his letters and Consulta- 
 tions, as Resident at Murshidabad, fired me with
 
 l66 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 admiration when a young Assistant Magistrate. 
 They led to the attempt, in my Annals of Rural 
 Bengal^ to explain for the first time the true 
 meaning of an Indian famine. 
 
 In 1 774 Richard Becher retired to England with 
 a competence after thirty-one years of service. 
 He was a man, by the common consent of his 
 fellow-men, absolutely pure-handed in the highest 
 offices, ending with that next to the Governorship 
 of Bengal. During seven years in England he had 
 the happiness to see his boys grow into manhood. 
 It was his sole reward in life. He lost his little 
 fortune in trying to help a friend, and was charitably 
 allowed to re-enter the Company's service at the 
 age of sixty. They gave him a compassionate 
 appointment as head of the Calcutta mint, together 
 with nominations to the Bengal Civil Service for 
 his sons, Richard and John. He brought out the 
 two lads with him in the autumn of 1781. The 
 youths, after long but not distinguished Indian 
 careers, lived on in comfort in England till 1830 
 and 1846. The old man could not forget that he 
 had been second only to the Governor, and died 
 after one year of subordinate office.
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 167 
 
 The inscription on his Calcutta tombstone, in 
 spite of some mortuary magniloquence, perhaps 
 best tells the tale. For it speaks the feeling of his 
 countrymen in Bengal at the time of his death. 
 After recording his services, the honourable modesty 
 of his fortune, and his return to England in 1774, it 
 concludes : ' By nature open, liberal and compas- 
 sionate : unpractised in guile and not suspecting it 
 in others, to prop the declining credit of a friend 
 he was led to put his all to the hazard, and fell 
 a victim to his own benevolence. After a short 
 pause and agonizing conflict, bound by domestic 
 claims to fresh exertions, in 1781 he returned to the 
 scene of his earlier efforts. But the vigour of life 
 was past and ... in the hopeless efforts to re-erect 
 the fortunes of his family, under the pang of dis- 
 appointment and the pressure of the climate, a worn 
 mind and debilitated body sank to rest. An un- 
 erring wisdom ordained that his reward should not 
 be of this world. Nov. 1 7, 1 782.' 
 
 I wonder if Thackeray had that sad story of his 
 mother's kinsman in mind, when he touched off, 
 with so tender a pathos. Colonel Newcome's loss 
 of fortune in old age ? Colonel Newcome is indeed
 
 1 68 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 a character made up of many simples. There is in it, 
 as we have seen, perhaps something of Thackeray's 
 grand-uncle and guardian Moore, something of the 
 chivalrous cousin Sir Richmond Shakespear, but 
 perhaps also something of the poor old Richard 
 Becher who lies in the South Park Street Ceme- 
 tery, Calcutta. Happy the family which could 
 count several members as the original of Colonel 
 Newcome ! 
 
 Richard Becher, notwithstanding his later misfor- 
 tunes, founded an Indian connexion scarcely less 
 powerful, or less widely spread, than that which 
 derives from the elephant- hunting Thackeray of 
 Sylhet. I have a manuscript record of no fewer 
 than fifteen Bechers in India during the half-century 
 after Richard's return thither in 1781. The India 
 List for 1893 still showed four Bechers and four 
 Thackerays in the services, besides many under 
 other names through the female descent. 
 
 It was into this great Bengal family that Richmond 
 Thackeray married. In 1779 John Harman Becher, 
 a kinsman of the above Richard, arrived in 
 Calcutta as a Writer. His career was cut short in 
 his eighteenth year of service, and, after struggling
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 169 
 
 against ill- health for three more years, he died 
 in India in 1800. He left a little daughter, who 
 grew into a beautiful girl of seventeen. This young 
 lady, according to the Calcutta Old Cathedral regis- 
 ter, Richmond Thackeray married on October 13, 
 1 8 1 o. On July 18, 1 8 1 1 , their son, William Make- 
 peace, the future novelist, was born at Calcutta. 
 Five months later Richmond Thackeray was ap- 
 pointed Collector of the extensive District lying 
 around the capital, then considered one of the prizes 
 of the Bengal Service. 
 
 The young couple merely moved a mile out to 
 their official residence in the suburbs, without any 
 break in their Calcutta social life. The Collector's 
 house at Alipur, which now became their home, was 
 the country lodge of Sir Philip Francis in the last 
 century : the ' villa inter paludes ' where he held his 
 weekly symposiums. The same house, with a wing 
 and an upper story added, remains the official 
 residence of the Collector of that District. 
 
 In it Richmond Thackeray spent the remaining 
 four years of his life. His work was thenceforth 
 confined to the routine of an old-established Dis- 
 trict, for a time supplemented by duty in Calcutta.
 
 I70 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 In him centered the whole internal administration 
 of a tract of two thousand square miles, with a 
 population now exceeding one and a half millions, 
 exclusive of Calcutta and its suburbs. Besides this 
 settled area, a wide unsurveyed region of forest and 
 swamp, through which the Bengal rivers merge 
 into the sea, then formed part of his jurisdiction. 
 Thackeray had thus the capital of India at one end 
 of his District and a no-man's-land of creeks and 
 jungle, inhabited only by tigers, deer, crocodile, 
 and the few remnants of the old river-pirates, at 
 the other. 
 
 Although his duties partook more of a daily 
 round than in his previous frontier Districts, they 
 were sufficiently numerous. He supervised the col- 
 lection of the revenue, exceeding ;^ 100,000 a year, 
 from the land and other sources. He was a criminal 
 judge and a judge in land-suits, both of first 
 instance and in appeal ; and as head of the police 
 responsible for the peace of the District and 
 the prevention of crime. But these by no means 
 exhausted his multifarious functions. 
 
 The Collector of a Bengal District does in his 
 local sphere all that the Home Secretary superin-
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 171 
 
 tends in England, and a great deal more. For he 
 is the representative of a paternal and not of a 
 constitutional Government. Roads, ferries, bridges, 
 river-floods, jails, lunatics, child-landowners. State 
 pensioners and wards, education, epidemics, dispen- 
 saries, payments for killing snakes and tigers, cattle- 
 disease, municipalities, the reclamation of waste 
 lands, the introduction of new crops, village-pounds, 
 the embankment and the deepening of water- 
 channels, the changing prospects of the harvest, and 
 measures to relieve distress caused by failure of the 
 rains, form a few of the matters with which he has 
 to deal. If some of them have developed since 
 Richmond Thackeray's time, others were more 
 exclusively concentrated in his hands. 
 
 Richmond Thackeray was a great road-maker. 
 On coming to Calcutta in 1807 he had observed the 
 inferior material, broken brick or lumps of burnt 
 clay, used for the streets; and contrasted them 
 with the durable roads metalled from the iron strata 
 and nodular limestone in his old District, Birbhum. 
 He accordingly urged the advantages of the Bir- 
 bhum * gravel ' on the Committee for improving the 
 town ; and had samples sent down for their inspec-
 
 172 THE THACKERAY S IN INDIA 
 
 tion. The city was then beginning to push its way 
 out towards the south, and his settlement of the 
 suburban hamlets over eighty years ago forms a 
 landmark in the history of Calcutta. 
 
 On September 13, 181 5, Richmond Thackeray 
 died; aged thirty-two years, ten months and 
 twenty-three days, says his tombstone. This would 
 make his birthday October 21, 1782, instead of 
 September i, 1 781, as stated in the Family Book 
 (ante, p. 141). They laid him in the North Park 
 Street Cemetery : on the other side of the road from 
 the graveyard in which his wife's kinsman, Richard 
 Becher, sleeps off the sorrows of his old age. 
 
 You walk along the north side of Park Street, 
 passing a couple of closed burial-grounds, until you 
 come to a padlocked gate of a third cemetery, 
 labelled with municipal precision No. 28, when last 
 I visited it. After a delay, you may get the key 
 from the doorkeeper of a fourth graveyard, just 
 opposite. Enter the gate, and turn to the left, 
 until, by a coarse path of broken brick, lined with 
 blackened and ruinous sepulchres, you reach the 
 western wall. Then go on twenty paces, and you 
 are at Richmond Thackeray's tomb.
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 1 73 
 
 It is a brick monument consisting of a squat 
 column rising from an oblong base. The plaster, 
 when I saw it, was scaling off, and the platform 
 showed signs of decay. Yet the whole was in 
 good preservation compared with some of the 
 hideous ruins around. Near it on the right rose 
 a poor khatar tree, its laurel-like leaves very 
 dusty. A toddy palm of an equally sordid growth 
 stood three graves off on the left. But the sunset 
 poured a golden flood over the wall from the west 
 on the shrivelled foliage and the forgotten dead. 
 
 At the other side of the red path rises an impos- 
 ing mausoleum to a boy civilian, Thomas Henry 
 Graham, ' who fell gloriously,' says his inscription, 
 ' in an action between the Honourable East India 
 Company's ship Kent and a French privateer 
 at the mouth of the Ganges, on October 7, 1 800 — 
 the day on which he completed the sixteenth year 
 of his age.' We have seen how another boy 
 hero, ' Billy ' Speke, gave his life also at the age 
 of sixteen on the earlier Kent which carried 
 Admiral Watson's flag. In 1 798, two years before 
 young Graham's death on his way to join his first 
 appointment, Richmond Thackeray sailed for India,
 
 174 3r«£ THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 also in his sixteenth year. After seventeen years' 
 service they buried him opposite Graham with 
 a tribute to his worth as a public officer, ' a son, 
 a brother, a husband, a father, and a friend.' 
 
 To the same graveyard had been borne, a few 
 years earlier, amid the boom of minute guns and 
 the pomp of military honours. Colonel Ball, 
 Adjutant-General of the Bengal Army, glorious 
 from the campaigns of Lord Lake. Not far off 
 rests the soldier-political. Colonel Achilles Kirk- 
 patrick, who imposed the treaty on the Nizam 
 which demolished the French power, and made 
 our own supreme, in Southern India. Among- 
 sailors are the once famous Ambrose Kepling-, and 
 Captain Cudbert Thornhill, a sort of eighteenth - 
 century Sinbad, honourably mentioned by Bruce 
 the Abyssinian traveller, and at whose death ' all 
 the vessels in the harbour, both foreign and British, 
 joined the Honourable Company's Marine in lower- 
 ing their colours half mast.' Here also sleeps the 
 good doctor. Surgeon William Pitt Muston, the 
 inventor or improver of the army dooley, who, after 
 a life of humanity, obtained a slow redress against 
 injustice from the Court of Directors, but returned
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 1 75 
 
 to India only to hear of the fall of his gallant son, 
 and to sink broken-hearted into the grave. 
 
 The old civil service is well represented by 
 a Shore, son of the civilian Governor- General Lord 
 Teignmouth the real framer of the Permanent 
 Settlement of Bengal ; by a Halked, son of the 
 civilian codifier of Hindu Law ; by Peter Sp>eke, 
 long a ruling voice in the Supreme Council ; 
 and by a multitude of once potent civilian names, 
 including a Groeme, an Udny, a couple of Barwells, 
 and of course a Chichely Plowden. The page 
 of the Obituary which begins with the inscription 
 to Richmond Thackeray ends with one from the 
 tomb of Mrs. Arthur Grote in the same graveyard 
 — two Bengal civilian families destined to perpetual 
 honour. 
 
 Richmond Thackeray left an only son, the future 
 novelist, just four years old. The young mother, 
 herself only twenty-three, found a home with her 
 relatives in India, and to the grief of widow- 
 hood had soon to add the sorrow of separation 
 from her child. This was in 18 17. Forty-four 
 years afterwards Thackeray, in one of his Round- 
 about Papers, described a similar parting, ' remem-
 
 176 THE TH ACKER AYS IN INDIA 
 
 bering in long long distant days,' he says, 'such 
 a ghaut or river-stair at Calcutta ; and a day when 
 down those steps, to a boat which was in waiting, 
 came two children whose mothers remained on 
 shore.' The two children were Thackeray and his 
 cousin, Sir Richmond Shakespear. 
 
 The beautiful young mother was the dream 
 of his childhood. ' He drew me your house in 
 Calcutta,' wrote Grandmamma Becher soon after 
 Thackeray's arrival in England, ' not omitting the 
 monkey looking out of the window, and black 
 Betty at the top drying the towels.' This was 
 a postscript to Thackeray's first extant letter to 
 his mother at the age of six and a half years. Her 
 engagement to Captain Carmichael Smyth, after- 
 wards Superintendent of Addiscombe, never 
 loosened the early bond. In that first letter the 
 child sends his love to the Captain, 'and tell 
 him he must bring you home to your affectionate 
 little son.' 
 
 It was the mother's influence that remained 
 with him through life. Divided by half the world 
 the child clung to her memory : the separation 
 was followed by years of tender reunion which
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 1 77 
 
 ended only with his death. When suffering from 
 the tyrant of a private school, ' I remember,' he 
 wrote forty years afterwards, ' kneeling by my 
 little bed at night, and saying, " Pray God I may 
 dream of my mother." ' The public schoolboy at 
 Charterhouse wrote almost daily to her a sort 
 of journal. For her the gay young man at Cam- 
 bridge and Weimar found leisure to compile the 
 most delightful pictorial epistles. On her second 
 widowhood his house became her home. His one 
 surviving daughter bears her name. The shadow 
 of a great domestic sorrow settled heavily on his 
 prime : he was cut off before he reached the honours 
 of old age. But the tenderness of that beautiful 
 mother went with him through his whole life. He 
 was her only child ; and the same gentle eyes that 
 filled with joy when he was born wept with sorrow 
 when he was laid under the sod. On the first 
 anniversary of his death she followed him to her 
 own grave. 
 
 When I knew her,' writes the family chronicler, 
 ' she was old, and her hair — of a lovely whiteness — 
 contrasted with her fine eyebrows. There was 
 a look of great refinement and nobleness about 
 
 M
 
 178 THE THACKERAY S IN INDIA 
 
 her.' ' Walk into the drawing-room,' writes 
 Thackeray of the home which he made for his 
 mother's evening of life. ' There sits an old lady 
 of more than fourscore years, serene and kind, and 
 as beautiful in her age now as in her youth. She 
 is as simple as if she had never had any flattery 
 to dazzle her. Can that have been anything but 
 a good life which, after more than eighty years of 
 it was spent, is so calm ? ' 
 
 An influence of another kind on Thackeray's 
 character was his descent, through his grandmother 
 Amelia Richmond-Webb, from the noble Constables 
 of Richmond and Lords of Burton. His father 
 perpetuated their name of Richmond in the last 
 century, as his son-in-law does in the present one. 
 The great novelist used their crest as his signet 
 ring : a coronet transfixed with three darts, from one 
 of which fall three drops of blood, in combination 
 with a monogram designed by himself Thackeray 
 had the genuine pride of birth, the absence of which 
 is so often covered over by the mixture of ostenta- 
 tion and meanness which he branded as snobbery. 
 His love of ancient lineage was no mean admira- 
 tion of mean things, but a noble admiration of noble
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 1 79 
 
 deeds. He gave his grandmother's name, Amelia, 
 to the lady whom he intended to be the purest 
 of his early female creations. In his historical 
 masterpiece of Esmond he makes his famous 
 relative, General Webb, stand out as he does in 
 the tapestry at Blenheim. Indeed the prominence 
 of the burly brigadier forms perhaps a little bit of 
 wrong perspective in that great novel. 
 
 But if the grandmother's ancestry touched his 
 imagination with the wand of romance, he derived 
 the strong fibre of his nature from the grand- 
 father's side. During a hundred years his branch 
 of the Thackerays had been a landless people 
 belonging to the strictly professional class. Of 
 sixty -nine kinsmen and collaterals whose career 
 I have been able to trace, twenty-four entered the 
 army or navy, nineteen were churchmen, nine were 
 barristers, eight were Indian civilians, seven were 
 medical men, two were Eton masters. Every 
 Thackeray since the Archdeacon, nearly two 
 hundred years ago, had to earn his living in 
 some honourable profession : by his sword, tongue, 
 or pen. In the generation immediately preceding 
 the novelist, we have seen that at least four uncles 
 
 M 2
 
 l8o THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 and one aunt had literary gifts. Thackeray's 
 genius was the flowering of a century and a half 
 of family culture ; a culture of which the beautiful 
 after-efflorescence still blooms in Oid Kensington^ 
 \h&Story of Elizabeth^ and the Village on the Cliff. 
 Thackeray's robustness of character, his hatred of 
 shams, his scorn of all things base, had their roots 
 deep down in the manly life of the old Yorkshire 
 moorland. The power of producing high -class 
 mental work to order, when work must needs be 
 done, came to him from a century of later ancestors 
 who had made their bread by their brains. The 
 loneliness and unsatisfied dim yearnings for love 
 which each generation of Anglo-Indian children 
 suffer, and the perpetual pathos of parting in our 
 Indian life, have also left a touching record on his 
 pages. ' Strong men alone on their knees,' he tells 
 us, ' with streaming eyes and broken accents, implore 
 heaven for those little ones who were prattling at 
 their sides but a few hours since. Long after they 
 are gone, careless and happy, recollections of the 
 sweet past rise up and smite those who remain : the 
 flowers they had planted in their little gardens, 
 the toys they played with, the little vacant cribs
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL l8l 
 
 they slept in as fathers' eyes looked blessings down 
 on them.' 
 
 The clerical traditions of a family, with nineteen 
 parsons among them, made Thackeray, quite apart 
 from his intellectual convictions, the friend of true 
 churchmen, and filled his imagination with the 
 poetry of the rites of the Church. ' How should he 
 who knows you,' he wrote, ' not respect you or your 
 calling ? May this pen never write a pennyworth 
 again if it ever cast ridicule upon either.' His boy- 
 hood was solitary. For him, memory required a long • 
 vista to soften the harsh lines of his school years, 
 and to etherealise the Slaughter House (Charter 
 House) of his earlier novels into the Grey Friars, 
 to which the three friends made their tender pil- 
 grimage, and where the old colonel murmured his 
 last Adswn. It is the recollection, however, of the 
 chapel-service which makes the transformation 
 complete. ' A plenty of candles lights up this 
 chapel and this scene of age and youth and early 
 memories, and pompous death. How solemn the 
 well-remembered prayers are, here uttered again 
 in the place where in childhood we used to hear 
 them. How beautiful and decorous the rite:
 
 l82 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 how noble the ancient words of the supplications 
 which the priest utters, and to which generations of 
 fresh children, and troops of bygone seniors, have 
 cried Amen.' 
 
 But the greatest single influence of Thackeray's 
 life-work was still his mother. My earliest portrait 
 of him is that of a little child clinging to his 
 mother, her arm around his neck, and the father 
 sitting close by. At any rate it is something 
 that the best of Bengal civilian families in the 
 last century furnished the mother of Thackeray. 
 The lofty tenderness for women which he lear-ned 
 from that mother, he lavished on his wife until 
 parted from her by her dark malady ; it over- 
 flowed to his daughters, and breathes in his works. 
 How exquisite the transition in the closing verse of 
 his White Squally when 
 
 ' The harmless storm was ended, 
 And as the sunrise splendid 
 
 Came blushing o'er the sea ; 
 I thought, as day was breaking, 
 My little girls were waking. 
 And smiling, and making 
 
 A prayer at home for me.' 
 
 In Lady Castlewood he runs up the whole gamut
 
 THACKERAY'S FATHER IN BENGAL 183 
 
 of tenderness, from the subdued sentiment of the 
 Cathedral scene on Esmond's return from the wars, 
 to the high-strung scene of her presentation of him 
 as head of the family to the Duke of Hamilton — 
 one of not too many passages in which Thackeray 
 cared to reach the sublime. In his lecture on Dean 
 Swift what a picture of the Nemesis which avenges 
 heartlessness to women ! ' He was always alone, 
 alone, and gnashing in the darkness, except when 
 Stella's sweet smile came and shone on him. When 
 that went, silence and utter night closed over him. 
 An immense genius, an awful downfall and ruin.' 
 ' A good woman,' he says elsewhere, ' is the loveliest 
 flower that blooms under heaven, and we look with 
 love and wonder upon its silent grace, its pure 
 fragrance, its delicate bloom of beauty.' ' Lucky 
 is he in life who knows a few such women ! A kind 
 providence of Heaven it was that sent us such, and 
 gave us to admire that touching and wonderful 
 spectacle of innocence and love and beauty.' 
 
 How would he have chosen that this chronicle of 
 the strenuous lives of his countrymen in India — 
 sometimes unloved, often ill-requited, generally cut 
 short — should end ?
 
 184 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA 
 
 ' Canst thou, O friendly reader,' he asks, ' count 
 upon the fidelity of an artless heart or tender or two, 
 and reckon among the blessings which Heaven hath 
 bestowed on thee the love of faithful women? 
 Purify thine own heart, and try to make it worthy 
 of theirs. All the prizes of life are nothing 
 compared to that one. All the rewards of ambition, 
 wealth, pleasure, only vanity and disappointment 
 grasped at greedily and fought for fiercely, and 
 over and over again found worthless by the weary- 
 winners.' It was the mother of Thackeray that 
 taught him to think thus of women. Her kindred 
 lie amid the dismal sepulchres of Calcutta grave- 
 yards. But her nobler nature did not perish. It is 
 immortal in the immortality of the manliest and 
 tenderest man of letters of our age.
 
 C 185 ] 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Agnew, Vans, tablet to his 
 memory in Calcutta Cathedral, 
 quoted, 59. 
 
 Anville : see D'Anville. 
 
 Aylmer, Hose, daughter of Lord 
 Aylmer, and one of Landor's 
 early loves, 59, 60 ; her death 
 in Calcutta and her tombstone, 
 59, 60 ; Landor's elegy on her, 
 61. 
 
 Ball, Colonel, 174. 
 
 Barwell, Bichard, 15 ; his duel 
 with Sir John Clavering, 1 7 ; 
 Francis' opinion of him, 25. 
 
 Batson, Mr., 24. 
 
 Becher, Anne, wife of Rich- 
 mond Thackeray, 159-61 ; 
 169; birth of her son Wil- 
 liam Makepeace (the novelist), 
 169 ; second marriage to Cap- 
 tain Carmichael Smyth, 1 76 ; 
 her influence on her son, 176-7, 
 182-4 > fa^"" death, 177. 
 
 Beoher, John, 166. 
 
 Becher, John Harman, 168-9. 
 Becher, Bichard, his life and 
 
 misfortunes, 160-6 ; his death, 
 
 166-7. 
 Bengal Obituary, The, 56, 62, 
 
 175- 
 Bentinck, Lord "William, 
 
 Governor of Madras, 124-6, 
 
 128-9. 
 Bosworth Smith, his Life of 
 
 Lord Lawrence, 58. 
 Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, 
 
 174. 
 Burke, Edmund, 106. 
 
 O. 
 
 Calcutta, the grave-yards of, 9, 
 13, 17, 18, 21, 23, 27-8, 32, 
 53-3. 59-62, i39» 140, r<5i, 
 167, 172-5; life in, 11, 12; 
 founded by Job Chamock, 32, 
 38, 43-4, 47-8 ; rapid growth 
 of, 49-50; its unhealthiness, 
 50 ; its earliest newspaper, 55. 
 
 Caraccioli's Life of C live, 12. 
 
 Cartier, John, Governor of 
 Bengal, 70, 73, 81-3.
 
 i86 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Charnock, Job, founder of 
 Calcutta, 32, 44, 48, 55, 85 ; 
 previous career, 34-53; mar- 
 riage, 34-5 ; his repeated 
 attempts to settle at ' Cotton 
 Mart Hamlet,' afterwards Cal- 
 cutta, 41-5, 47-9 ; his unhappy 
 old age, 50, 51; his death and 
 burial in 1693, 51 ; his grave- 
 stone, 32, 52-3, 161 ; summary 
 of his life and character, 51-2. 
 
 Clavering, General Sir John, 
 15, 17, 18. 
 
 Clevland, Augustus, 59. 
 
 Clive, Lord Robert, 27, 69, 
 70-1, 73. 79. 84-5, 143, 
 162-4. 
 
 Clive, Lord, Governor of 
 Madras, 116. 
 
 College of Fort ■William, 142. 
 
 Congreve, Sir 'Williain, 108. 
 
 Coote, Sir Eyre, Commander- 
 in-Chief in India, 24, 25. 
 
 Cotton Mart Hamlet or Cot- 
 ton Thread Mart, a mud 
 hamlet on the east bank of 
 the river Hugli, the site of 
 the present Calcutta, 39-44, 
 47-50. 
 
 Dacca in the last century, 74. 
 Dalhousie, Lord, quoted, 140. 
 D'Anville, 77. 
 
 De Bichmond : see Rich- 
 mond. 
 
 E. 
 
 East India Company, 67 ; Ben- 
 gal granted to it by the Mughal 
 
 Emperor in 1765, 68-9; its 
 investment, its servants and 
 their private trade, 71-3, 84; 
 its retrenchments, 79-80. 
 
 Elphinstone, Hon. Mount- 
 stuart, 156. 
 
 Englishman, The, Calcutta 
 newspaper, 11 4- .5. 
 
 Evans, John, Chaplain to the 
 East India Company and pri- 
 vate trader, afterwards Bishop 
 of Bangor and finally of 
 Armagh, 47, 49, 52. 
 
 F. 
 
 Foley, George, his grave in 
 South Park Street Cemetery, 
 61. 
 
 Francis, Sir Philip, 10, 11; 
 his identity with 'Junius,' 14 ; 
 leaves England in chagrin and 
 arrives in Calcutta in 1774, 14; 
 his colleagues in the Indian 
 Council, 14, 15 ; his resolve 
 to become Governor of Bengal, 
 15; his intrigues to ruin War- 
 ren Hastings, 15, 16, 92 ; his 
 schemes defeated, 16 ; his duel 
 with Warren Hastings, 21-2 ; 
 returns to England, 1780, 22 ; 
 death in 1818, 23; his libel 
 on Sir Eyre Coote, 24-5 ; 
 various references to, 68, 106, 
 169. 
 
 G. 
 
 Graham, Thomas Henry, his 
 
 grave in Calcutta, 173. 
 Grand, George, 68.
 
 INDEX 
 
 187 
 
 Grant, John Peter, 114. 
 Qrote, Mrs, Arthur, 175. 
 
 Halked, 175. 
 
 Hamilton, Surgeon 'William, 
 cures the Emperor of Delhi 
 and obtains privileges for the 
 English Company, 32-3; in- 
 gratitude of the Directors, 33 ; 
 his death in 1717 and burial 
 in Calcutta, 34 ; his grave- 
 stone, 32, 34, 53. 
 
 Harris, Mr. James, Chief of 
 the Council of Dacca in 1 7 7 1 , 
 81-2 ; marries Henrietta 
 Thackeray in 1772, 82 ; their 
 return to England and life 
 there, 82-3 ; his death, 83. 
 
 Hastings, "Warren, 13, 15, 71, 
 82, 85, 89, 92, 160 ; parentage, 
 19, 20; long conflict with Sir 
 Philip Francis, 16, 17; duel 
 with Francis, 21,22; death in 
 1818, 23. 
 
 Heath, Captain, 45-6. 
 
 Hicky's Bengal Gazette (1780), 
 the earliest Calcutta news- 
 paper, 55. 
 
 Holland, Lord, 106. 
 
 Holwell, hero and historian of 
 ' the Black Hole of Calcutta,' 
 is dismissed from the East 
 India Company's service, 163 ; 
 his literary works, 164. 
 
 I. 
 
 Impey, Sir Elijah, 63. 
 Inglis, Sir Hugh, a trader at 
 
 Dacca, his help to theThacke- 
 
 rays, ili, 112. 
 
 Ives, Dr., surgeon on Admiral 
 Watson's flag-ship, quoted, 
 38-31. 
 
 Junius : see Sir Philip Fran- 
 cis. 
 
 Kaye, Sir James William, 
 
 quoted, 147. 
 Kepling, Ainbrose, 174. 
 Kilpatrick, Major, his death 
 
 and burial in 1757, 28. 
 Kirkpatrick, Colonel Achilles, 
 
 174. 
 Kukis, a hill-tribe, 90. 
 
 Iiandor, "Walter Savage, his 
 love for and elegy on Rose 
 Aylmer, 59-61. 
 
 Leith, John Parley, 114. 
 
 Xiindsay, Hon. Bobert, son of 
 the Earl of Balcarres, Resident 
 or ' Collector ' of Sylhet in 
 1778, 86 ; his administration 
 of Sylhet and private trade, 
 86-90, 92, 93. 
 
 Low, Qeneral Sir John, British 
 Resident in Oudh ; his mar- 
 riage to Augusta Shakespear, 
 147- 
 
 M. 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, his story of 
 Warren Hastings' parentage, 
 1 3 ; proofs of its falseness, 1 9,
 
 i88 
 
 INDEX 
 
 20 ; his essays set up at 
 The Englishman Press, Cal- 
 cutta, 115. 
 
 Markham, Sir Clements, 
 quoted, 78, 81. 
 
 Milton, John, his last de- 
 scendant died in Madras, 9. 
 
 Minto, Lord, 159. 
 
 Moira, Lord, 148-9. 
 
 Monson, Colonel, 15 ; his ill- 
 ness and death, 18. 
 
 Monson, Iiady Anne, her an- 
 cestors, 19 ; her whist-parties 
 in Calcutta, 19; her slander 
 of Warren Hastings, 19; her 
 death, 20 ; and grave, 18. 
 
 Moore, Mr. Peter, 100-2 ; 
 his marriage to Sarah Rich- 
 mond Webb and life in Eng- 
 land, 102-4 ; l^is parliamentary 
 career, 105-7 5 ^is speculations, 
 ruin and death, 106-8 ; his 
 guardianship of his great- 
 nephew, the novelist, 109-1 1 1 . 
 
 Munro, Sir Thomas, 117 ; his 
 settlement of the ' Ceded Pro- 
 vinces,' 1 1 7-1 2 1 ; his friendship 
 for William Thackeray, 121, 
 1 23, 1 30 ; Governor of Madras 
 in 1820, 133 ; his tribute to 
 William Thackeray's memory, 
 134; death of his nephew, 
 136. 
 
 Muston, Surgeon ViTilliam 
 Pitt, 174. 
 
 N. 
 
 Worth Park Street Graveyard, 
 Calcutta ; Richard Becher 
 buried in 1782, 167; Rich- 
 
 mond Thackeray in 1815, 
 172-3 ; Thomas Henry Gra- 
 ham in 1800, 173; also 
 Colonel Ball, Colonel Achilles 
 Kirkpatrick, Ambrose Kep- 
 ling. Captain Cudbert Thorn- 
 hill, Surgeon William Pitt 
 Muston, 174 ; Shore, Halked, 
 Peter Spelce, Groeme, Udny, 
 Chichely Plowden, two Bar- 
 wells, and Mrs. Arthur Grote, 
 175- 
 
 O. 
 
 Orme, 51, 57. 
 
 P. 
 
 Park, Mungo, 77. 
 
 Park Street Cemeteries, Cal- 
 cutta: see Worth Park Street 
 and South Park Street 
 Graveyards. 
 
 Pearse, Colonel, Warren Has- 
 tings' second in his duel with 
 Francis, 21-3. 
 
 Pigot, Lord, Governor of Ma- 
 dras, 24. 
 
 Plowden, Chichely, 175. 
 
 B. 
 
 Bay, Miss, 68. 
 
 Bennell, Major James, 75-7 ; 
 death in 1830 and burial in 
 Westminster Abbey, 77 ; nar- 
 row escapes, 78-81 ; Surveyor- 
 General of Bengal, 79 ; his 
 ■ opinion of Clive's retrench- 
 ments, 79-80 ; marriage to 
 Jane Thackeray, 78, 81 ; their
 
 INDEX 
 
 189 
 
 married life in Bengal, 95, 96 ; 
 and in England, 103 ; his posi- 
 tion as a geographer, 104 ; 
 reference to, 140. 
 
 Richmond, original name of a 
 family claiming descent from 
 the De Richmonds, changed in 
 the fifteenth centnry, through 
 marriage, to Richmond- 
 "Webb, 97-8, 100. 
 
 Richmond-'Webb : see Bich- 
 mond ; also Webb. 
 
 Ritchie, Mrs. Anne, daughter 
 of the novelist, 1 59, 1 80. 
 
 Ritter, 77. 
 
 Rollin, his Ancient History, 
 quoted, 80. 
 
 Russell, Sir Henry, Chief 
 Justice of Bengal, and Lady 
 Russell, 60, 63. 
 
 S. 
 
 Saint John's Churchyard, 
 Calcutta ; Admiral Watson 
 buried there, 27, 161 ; also 
 ' Billy ' Speke, 28, 32 ; Job 
 Chamock, the founder of 
 Calcutta, 32, 161 ; Surgeon 
 Hamilton, 32 ; Charlotte 
 Becher, 161 ; monument to 
 twelve officers who fell in a 
 conflict with the Rohillas, 32. 
 
 Sandwich, Lord, 68. 
 
 Shakespear, Augusta, her mar- 
 riage to General Low, 147. 
 
 Shakespear, Colonel John 
 Dowdeswell, 147. 
 
 Shakespear, John Talbot, 
 marriage to Emily Thackeray, 
 146, 147 ; death, 149. 
 
 Shakespear, Colonel Sir Rich- 
 mond, 147-8. 
 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 
 his death and burial, 106-7. 
 
 Shore, a son of the Governor- 
 General, Lord Teignmouth ; 
 his grave, 175. 
 
 Smith, Bosworth, 58. 
 
 Smyth, Captain Carmichael, 
 second husband of Anne 
 Becher, 176. 
 
 South Park Street Graveyard, 
 Calcutta; opened in 1767, 
 13; Sir John Clavering buried 
 there, 1 7 ; also Colonel Mon- 
 son in 1776 and his wife, Lady 
 Anne, 18; Colonel Pearse in 
 1789, 21; Rose Aylmer in 
 1800, 60; George Foley, 61 ; 
 Richard Becher, 167, 172; 
 and many Bayleys, 62. 
 
 Speke, ' Billy,' son of Captain 
 Henry Speke, and midshipman 
 on Admiral Watson's flagship ; 
 father and son both struck 
 during the capture of Chandar- 
 nagar, 29 ; heroic fortitude 
 and death of ' Billy,' 29-31. 
 
 Speke, Peter, 175. 
 
 Stocqueler, J. H., 114. 
 
 Talleyrand, Princesse de, 68. 
 
 Thackerays, The, a great In- 
 dian family, their history, 
 64-7. 
 
 Thackeray, Augusta, sister to 
 Richmond Thackeray ; goes 
 out to him in India, 146; 
 her marriage to Mr. Elliot, 147.
 
 190 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Thackeray, Charles, youngest 
 son of W. M. Thackeray and 
 uncle of the novelist ; bom 
 1 794, 1 1 3 ; his life in India as a 
 barrister, and journalist, 114; 
 his death, 114. 
 Thackeray, Emily, sister to 
 Richmond Thackeray ; goes 
 out to him in India, 146 ; 
 her marriage to John Talbot 
 Shakespear, 146 ; her children, 
 147-8 ; her death, 149. 
 Thackeray, The Rev. Francis, 
 son of W. M. Thackeray and 
 uncle of the novelist ; his life 
 and writings, 112, 113. 
 Thackeray, Henrietta, sister of 
 W. M. Thackeray and great- 
 aunt of the novelist ; her home 
 in Dacca with her brother, 75 ; 
 her marriage to J. Harris in 
 1772, 82 ; her life and widow- 
 hood in England, 83, 102 ; 
 her descendants, 83. 
 Thackeray, Jane, eldest sister 
 to W. M. Thackeray, 75, 78 ; 
 her marriage to James Ren- 
 nell, 78. See Rennell 
 Thackeray, Bichmond, born 
 1 78 1, second son of W. M. 
 Thackeray and father of the 
 novelist ; his education, 141 ; 
 his life in India, 141-3, 145-6, 
 149. 150. i52-9> 168-71; 
 his marriage to Anne Becher, 
 159, 169; birth of his son 
 William Makepeace (the 
 novelist), 169 ; his death in 
 1 81 5 and burial in Calcutta, 
 172. 
 Thackeray, St. John, son of 
 
 W. M. Thackeray, uncle of 
 the novelist ; enters the 
 Madras Civil Service in 1809, 
 135 ; his life in India and gal- 
 lant death in 1824, 136. 
 
 Thackeray, Dr.Thomas, great- 
 grandfather of the novelist 
 Head-master of Harrow, 66-7. 
 
 Thackeray, Thomas, Lieu- 
 tenant, eighth son of \V. M. 
 and Amelia Thackeray, and 
 uncle of the novelist ; his 
 career and heroic death, 
 
 137-9- 
 
 Thackeray, Webb, third son 
 of W. M. Thackeray and 
 uncle of the novelist, 100; 
 enters the Madras Civil Ser- 
 vice as writer in 1806, 135 ; 
 his death, 135. 
 
 Thackeray, William, bom 
 1778, eldest son of W. M. 
 Thackeray, 116-7; appointed 
 assistant to Sir Thomas Munro 
 in 1800, 1 16; their friendship, 
 1 21-3 ; member of the Board 
 of Revenue in 1806, 126 ; Lord 
 W. Bentinck's opinion of him, 
 127; his 'Report' of 1807, 
 131 ; Chief Secretary to the 
 Government in 1810, 133; 
 illness, 133 ; President of the 
 Board of Revenue in 1820, 
 134; death in 1823, 134; 
 tributes to his memory, 134. 
 Thackeray,. William Make- 
 peace, son of Dr. Thomas 
 Thackeray and grandfather of 
 the novelist ; birth and educa- 
 tion, 67 ; voyage to India, 68 ; 
 arrival in Calcutta in 1766,
 
 INDEX 
 
 191 
 
 69 ; his five years there, 70-3 ; 
 Factor and Fourth in Council 
 at Dacca in 1771, 73 ; sends 
 for his two sisters, their mar- 
 riages in India, 75-83 ; private 
 trading, 83-5 ; ' Collector ' of 
 Sylhet, 85-9 ; his army-con- 
 tract for elephants, 91-2 : 
 administration of Sylhet, 93-5 ; 
 Third in Coimcil at Dacca in 
 1 774,95 ; marriage with Ame- 
 lia Richmond Webb in 1776, 
 98 ; return to England and 
 home at Hadley, 98, 100, 
 102-5 > '^^s whole official pay, 
 99 ; his children, 100, 105, 
 112, 115; death in 1813, 105- 
 
 Thackeray, William Make- 
 peace (the novelist) ; his pa- 
 rents, 159, 168; birth at 
 Calcutta, 1 68 ; death and 
 funeral of his father, 64, 108, 
 172; is sent to England at 
 the age of six, 109, 175 ; visits 
 to his guardian and grand- 
 uncle, Mr. Peter Moore, at 
 Hadley, 109; his fortune, 109, 
 no; his mother's influence, 
 176-7, 182-4; letters to his 
 mother, 1 76-7 ; re-marriage 
 of his mother, 1 76 ; school- 
 days at Charterhouse, 176-7; 
 studies at Cambridge and 
 Weimar, 177; his crest and 
 ancestors, 178-9; his charac- 
 ter, 179, 180; his wife, 182; 
 his views of women, 182-4. 
 
 Thomhill, Captain Cudbert, 
 174. 
 
 V. 
 
 Vansittart, Governor of Bengal, 
 
 76. 
 Verelst, Governor of Bengal, 
 
 69. 
 
 W. 
 
 "Walckenaer, Baron, 77. 
 
 "Watson, Admiral, relieves 
 Calcutta after the Black Hole, 
 36-7 ; captures Hugli and 
 Chandamagar, 27 ; dies and 
 is buried in St. John's Church- 
 yard, 27 ; his signature forged 
 and his name calumniated, 
 27-8. 
 
 Webb, Amelia Richmond, 
 daughter of Col. Richmond 
 Webb, 97 ; her marriage to 
 William MakepeaceThackeray 
 in 1776, 98 ; her death, 105. 
 
 W^ebb, General John Rich- 
 mond, distinguished during 
 Marlborough's campaigns, 98. 
 
 Webb , Lieutenant - Colonel 
 Richmond, father of W. M. 
 Thackeray's wife, Amelia ; his 
 life summarised, 97 ; origin of 
 the family, 97 ; death of his 
 son, 1 00 ; his character and 
 advice to his son, 1 03. 
 
 Webb, Sarah Richmond, 
 eldest daughter of Colonel 
 Richmond Webb and sister to 
 Amelia, 102 ; her marriage to 
 Mr. Peter Moore, loa. 
 
 Wellesley, Marquis of, 143, 
 
 145- 
 W^oodward, John, 06.
 
 OXFORD : HORACE HART 
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 BY 
 
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